A Call to Action!
A Critical Time for Recycling in Chicago

The situation

In 2007, the City of Chicago finally abandoned its ineffective and wasteful blue bag program and launched a source-separated blue cart program. The goal was to provide more than 600,000 households with blue carts to be filled with recyclables by citizens and picked up by the City's Streets and Sanitation Department. The blue cart rollout began with selected neighborhoods and was to be completed by the end of 2011. However, in January 2010, the City stopped the expansion of this program dead in its tracks. Currently more than 360,000 households—about two thirds of those eligible-- are still waiting for their blue carts.

People all over the city watch with envy while their neighbors and friends take the simple step of carrying their recyclables out with their trash. They wonder when they can stop transporting their bottles and cans by car or bicycle to one of only thirty-three drop-off centers in the city. That’s thirty-three locations for hundreds of thousands of people. Little wonder that the recyclables often spill out of the bins or stack up beside them.

Of course, because of the spotty nature of the recycling options, there is almost no citywide recycling education. The result is relatively low participation in recycling in some neighborhoods where the blue cart program has been implemented while other neighborhoods beg for more frequent pickups and still others beg for their promised blue carts.

The Opportunity

On Monday, June 7, a window of opportunity was opened.Thirty-eighth Ward Alderman Tom Allen has introduced an Order, which, if passed, would require completion of the blue cart program implementation by providing blue carts to all remaining eligible City of Chicago households by September 1, 2010. Hearing frustration and anger from their constituents, many other aldermen are also questioning the decision by Mayor Daley and the City administration to halt further implementation of the blue cart program. At least thirteen other aldermen have signed on to cosponsor this Order.

At a hearing of the Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities to discuss the Order, almost twenty aldermen attended and spoke strongly in favor of it. Unfortunately, neither the Commissioner of Streets and Sanitation nor the Commissioner of the Environment attended the hearing.

The Chicago Recycling Coalition fully supports this Order. We believe that recycling is no longer a luxury; it is a standard service for a modern city, on a par with snow plowing and garbage collection. Plowing snow in only one third of the city would be unacceptable, and so is collecting recyclables for a similar proportion.

Our First Step

We ask you to join us in demanding that household recycling be provided citywide. In the next two months, we will be getting in touch with other environmental groups and all our CRC supporters to explore every possible option for making it clear to the City that Tom Allen is right. It's time to get this done.

As a first step, we're asking you to send an email in support of Alderman Allen's proposed order to your alderman (list at right), and the Department of the Environment, and Alderman Ginger Rugai, the Chair of the Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities. We also encourage you to call and/or send hardcopy letters to Mayor Daley and the Commissioner of Streets and Sanitation as their email addresses are not publicly available.

Follow the CRC on our Facebook page and check back here often for news updates on the Order and further actions we all can take to make sure that the blue cart program is made available to ALL neighborhoods in Chicago! If we don't take advantage of this opportunity and do it now, there is no telling when we may have another chance,