Missed Opportunity: Chicago Lags in Recycling

How many of you saw your grandmother clean up after a meal by pouring the leftover cooking grease into a coffee can and storing it in the refrigerator for use at the next meal? How about watching one of the infamous "bottle guys" pull their metal cart down the alley searching for any of the glass bottles to return for deposit. It could just be that this generation grew up in an era when people had to act frugally to survive, or it could be that they had the right idea all along. Humans are the only animal that looks at its resources in one direction: from extraction to burial. Every other system in nature sees the leftovers from one process as the feedstock for another, and so we should see the opportunity in our lives to put more of our resources to good use. No community would bury intentionally over a million dollars in cash every year, but that is what most neighborhoods do. We can stop this, and need look no further than what other cities have done to successfully turn their trash into treasure.

Chicagoans remember the failed Blue Bag program that the city ran up until the late 2000s. Although well intended, the concept - putting two different bags into the same can and hoping that the contents did not get mixed up in the process of collecting, transporting, and sorting - proved difficult to make work. The program resulted in an, at best, eight percent (8%) recycling rate (weight of total recycled material divided by the weight of all disposed material). Five years ago, the City of Chicago launched a pilot program to improve recycling in seven neighborhoods by introducing separate blue carts to go along with the black carts for landfill trash. The program's success has been mixed across the seven neighborhoods, but the top areas - including the 19th Ward - recycle between eighteen and twenty-two percent (18-22%) depending on the year. This looks like a great improvement, and one that would inspire expansion across the city. However, that has not occurred until just this summer with more wards now getting blue cans.

So when the program finally expands across the city, will that put Chicago on par with other cities? The short answer is no. The current national average for recycling in municipal solid waste is about twenty-five percent (25%). Of the twenty-five (25) largest cities in the United States, Chicago now ranks twenty-first (21st), tied with Columbus and ahead of only Nashville, Indianapolis, and Detroit. Assuming no city ahead of Chicago made improvements (and all have plans to improve significantly over the next three years), if all city residents recycled at the same rate as the top wards in Chicago, we would move up to fourteenth (14th) on the list.

Although many of the top cities (San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle) are mid-sized cities, and one could argue that they have an advantage over a large urban area like Chicago, Cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Diego - each with well over one million people - double and even triple even the neighborhoods with the best rates in Chicago. Even with its size, San Francisco recycles an astounding seventy-seven percent (77%) of what goes into its municipal waste, and expects to clear eighty percent (80%) in the coming years.

Why do these cities have such success with recycling while Chicago lags? What can we learn from their success to help move the needle in Chicago? The successful programs contain one or more of the following three characteristics:

1. Financial incentive
In San Francisco, residents pay a monthly fee for their trash pickups, but pay nothing for either the pickup of organic waste/composting or material recycling (plastic/paper/glass/metal). If they reduce their trash below a certain point, they get a smaller trash can and their rate drops to two-thirds of the typical rate. In Philadelphia, residents who use their recycling program receive rewards that they can spend at businesses in the city. These types of immediate financial incentives provide immediate feedback to the resident that their actions have value. The cost of pickup and trucking of recyclable material does not differ from landfill waste, but whereas the landfill waste requires payment to the operator of the disposal, the recyclable material at worst goes to a new process at little or no cost. When residents participate in this savings, they have more incentive to participate.

2. A "stick" to accompany the "carrot"
In order for recycling programs to have the market scale for success, residents must have a consequence for not participating. San Francisco and other cities levy fines on residents who do not recycle. Before we bristle too much at this, how many neighborhoods have "grass cutting" fines for unkept yards, loitering fines, soliciting fines, or towing fines for inoperable vehicles. We regularly fine behavior that we think leads to lower property values in our communities, and recycling should be no different. Especially in areas where waste removal charges appear on our property tax bills, we lower costs for all when we maximize participation.

3. Good regulation and market incentives
When first established, the reason blue carts could only go to seven wards was not the cost of new carts, but the ability for the market to process the recyclable material from all Chicago homes should participation increase significantly. We need processors who can cost effectively move material from truck to factory, and composting operations that return nutrients to soil efficiently. Up until a couple of years ago, the State of Illinois treated recyclers and composters with the same health regulations as landfills and trash transfer yards, even though the materials and processes did not justify the additional associated costs. Thankfully, the new regulations changed these requirements, and improved the business model for processors and composters. There is no surprise that California has four of the top five states in recycling rate as their regulations promote recycling and reward it.

For a community the size of the 19th Ward, we average somewhere between one million and one-and -a-half million dollar per year in landfill costs that we could avoid by increasing our rate from about twenty percent (20%) to fifty percent (50%). That money could be put to use employing people in the neighborhood, making the ward a hub for clean material. Working with neighboring communities, we can develop a clean composting facility to turn our food and yard waste into compost that we use every year to keep our landscapes beautiful. Instead of driving outside the neighborhood to purchase material from some other part of the state or country, we can beautify our blocks with products made right here in our community. There are a couple of immediate things we can do to make this happen:

• Rebuild the block captain program locally.  One or two homeowners on each block can share ideas, spread the word, and report back on ways to improve the program.
• Bring back yard waste collection.  Add to this food waste collection year round, and explore establishing a composting operation in the ward or a neighboring community to keep the capital in the area.
• Get better data from our haulers.  With more information on what we are throwing out, as well as when and where, we can make better decisions and find new opportunities.
• Establish a challenge and prize for the first ward to fifty percent (50%).  The City of Chicago has
  
  a sustainability plan that looks for improvement across the city.  We can challenge the rest of the city to beat us to doubling our rate, and reap the benefits at the same time.

All of us who lived through blue bags know that recycling did not work in that way. That does not mean that it does not work at all. If you find a chain of restaurants that has bad food, you do not stop going out to eat, you just do not go back to that business. We have the same opportunity with recycling. We can throw off the failures of the past and create a better future, and one where we turn trash sent out of state into a financial opportunity for the community.