Blog So, why doesn't Chicago really recycle again?

It’s Earth Day, for whatever that’s worth, which means media attention nationwide is being drawn to reducing, reusing, and recycling. It’s hard to get all that excited about this whole movement here in Chicago, though, because for all the city’s pro-green touting, two-thirds of neighborhoods don’t have access to blue cart recycling.

There’s a lot of reasons why the blue cart program has stalled, from the obvious—cost—to the not-so-obvious—weird “who comes next” political maneuvering. Throw in the years-old and totally false bitching about how recycling actually costs cities more money than it earns them, and everything slows to a grinding halt.

Beyond that, though, maybe recycling’s not a priority to the Daley administration because, well, tourists don’t see it. It was announced this week that Grant Park is getting a farmers’ market. That’s great and everything—more farmers’ markets for everyone—but are Chicago residents really going to make it to that particular market? With a large part of the population up in a snit about food deserts, why open a farmers’ market that only tourists will go to?

Well, that’s why: tourism. Chicago puts on a great face to the outside world, sometimes at the expense of its actual citizens. Every street divider downtown will have fresh, new plants, and every sidewalk will be clean—but Humboldt Park alleys will remain fairly filthy and lack those fancy blue bins. And those blue carts that do exist in fancier neighborhoods are usually overflowing, because pickup’s been reduced to once every two weeks. 

It’s no surprise that the city’s tackling recycling on a surface level at best. Chicago’s government has long been concerned with appearances rather than hard realities. Unsightly buildings like Cabrini Green are quickly torn down. There’s not even a marker where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened. Why bother remembering the bad stuff when, hey, Millennium Park!

Millennium Park’s nice and all, but the vast majority of Chicago’s population probably uses it sparingly at best. People go to concerts there, take their visiting friends there, and throw their empty water bottles in garbage cans, because, well, why not? Where else are we going to put them?

The city’s apparently in talks about expanding the blue cart program to other neighborhoods, particularly after last year’s bad press surrounding tens of thousands of bins sitting unused in a warehouse. Those talks may lead to outsourcing the program to private haulers, though that’s slowed to a crawl following the abysmal outcome of the parking meter fiasco.

Simply put though, Chicago simply must have a viable citywide recycling program, and we must have it now. Other cities are working to go waste-less by 2020, and we’re recycling far less than 25 percent of our garbage. In New York, residents who don’t recycle are fined heavily and often. In San Francisco, it’s the same thing. Cities like San Jose, California and Fort Worth, Texas have pay-as-you-throw programs, where garbage-collection costs are based on how much households throw out versus how much they recycle. And 170 communities in Illinois do the same thing. That’s a tricky proposition in a city made up of so many apartment buildings, but the cities already implementing these programs have seen dramatic reductions in their disposal costs across the board.

How can we teach our kids to recycle when it’s more of a theoretical proposition than an actuality? “Okay, save all your trash in a bin, and then load it into the car and drive to this dumpster in a park two miles away,” just isn’t cutting it anymore. Recycling should be easy, clean, and appealing. It should be citywide, and it should be for everyone.

There’s just no way that Chicago can be the world-class city it wants to be without looking to its future beyond locking down Lollapalooza for another five years and making nicer El stations. For Chicago to be nice, the world has to be nice, and we have to do our part—and soon.