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Papa’ s Got a Brand New Bag?
The press is on the Blue Bag story again, and change is in the wind
By Susan Rans

As a writer, one never wants to be known as a one-trick pony. It may have been useful in college to find dozens of ways to write the same term paper over and over, but it doesn’t work well as a livelihood. (Well, except for John Grisham and Dan Brown...)

So it is with some trepidation that I undertake my third Heartland Journal article about solid waste issues in Chicago. But recently there have been some revelations about the way in which recycling is handled in Chicago. And the City has undertaken an aggressive promotional campaign for the Blue Bag program. So, I have been charged with the assignment to bring environmentally conscious Chicagoans within Heartland’s earshot up to date on the never-ending Blue Bag saga, and I must heed my editor’s call.

 

First, some background.
Back in the halcyon days of 1993, before George W. Bush and the fashionable right-wing attempts to debunk profound environmental truths like global warming and species loss, folks really cared about simple efforts like recycling. The thinking, naïve as it may have been, was that if we each did our little bit to make it easier on the planet, we could create a consciousness and a lifestyle that would actually have an impact. In 1993, SUVs were just a glimmer in Detroit’s eye. The Internet was still a kind of secret club instead of a 24-hour shop-and-screech organ. (Imagine! No blogosphere!) And Chicago’s neighborhood groups thought they had worked in tandem with the City to create a recycling ordinance that would meet each community’s needs based on its housing stock, income level, and educational purposes.

General displeasure erupted two years later, therefore, when the City announced its unilateral decision to implement the Blue Bag program city-wide. Environmental and community activists cried foul; the input that had been carefully given and discussed with the City was nowhere to be found in this program, and it had never been mentioned as an alternative in any discussions. Suspicion of a greased deal set in—especially when the contract for the sorting centers was given to WMI, then known as Waste Management—the 3,000-pound gorilla of the garbage world. The Coalition for Appropriate Waste Disposal, which had engaged in the negotiations to implement the Recycling Ordinance, changed its name to the Chicago Recycling Coalition and organized opposition to the Blue Bag began.

Slowly but surely, however, Chicagoans began to accept the Blue Bags as part of city life, like periodic scandals and landslide victories for the Mayor. At a certain point in time, funders began to “recommend” (in that way that funders do) that maybe environmental groups might want to work on something else with their limited funds—the Blue Bag was here to stay. Around the same time, the City stopped pretending that recycling had anything to do with the environment by moving responsibility for the Blue Bag program from the Department of the Environment to the Department of Streets and Sanitation, where the commodity is known as garbage, not resources. Finally, recycling just dropped from the radar screen. Few city residents used the Blue Bag, and not many even knew about it.

What we discovered
Today, thanks to the dedication of a few activist remnants like the Chicago Recycling Coalition, and to the investigative work of the Chicago Tribune, we know much more about what made the Blue Bag tick. Over a year ago, investigations revealed that the ownership of Remedial Environmental Manpower (REM)—purportedly a women-owned business (W/MBE)—was actually a front for the Duff family. This made a few of us sit up and listen. REM was, after all, the privatized staffing organization for the Blue Bag sorting centers. People working at minimum wage, in dangerous conditions, sorted through the garbage, picking out the recyclables. They picked through all of our garbage. Not just the Blue Bags. So few folks used the Blue Bags that they just started ripping open all the bags. Most of what was recycled came from that process. And REM was being busted as an illegal W/MBE. James Duff ultimately pleaded guilty to charges regarding REM in order to keep the feds from trying his elderly mother, in whose name the W/MBE certification was held.

Then a story broke that recycling advocates had been flogging for a long time. One of the major components of the City’s monthly recycling numbers is something called “screened yard waste.” In fact, if you remove screened yard waste from the recycling numbers, the actual commodity recycling done by Chicago fluctuates between 9 and 12 %—paltry numbers. So, what’s screened yard waste? No, it is not the leaves and grass clippings that are supposed to be separated from the waste stream by Illinois statute. It is the stuff that’s left over after all the recyclables are picked and shaken out of the garbage at the sorting centers. It’s anything that can fall through a screen—glass shards, coffee grounds, batteries, unmentionables, gunk. Until recently, that stuff was mostly exported to Indiana under a program called Back 2 Basics. There, it was spread on a farm field and called a growing medium. The farmer who took this stuff had recently testified at the City Council hearings that it grew great veggies, and he even brought some to share. But when the story hit the Tribune, the State of Indiana revoked his permit to dump it on his land. Seems they didn’t think it was a great growing medium; instead, it might contain hazardous and heavy metal waste. Now no one knows where “screened yard waste” is going, although the City still claims it as “recycled” in its numbers.

Finally, the recent scandal about the use of hired trucks in city operations came to light. Sifting through that story, Chicagoans became familiar with the acronym HDO (Hispanic Democratic Organization) and its ties to hired trucks, Streets and Sanitation, and, yes, the Blue Bags. Just last month, the Tribune revealed the new Blue Bag contract holder, Allied Waste, was connected to a mayoral pal and trucking company owner and big HDO supporter. Oh, and they also revealed in the process that the already-cooked numbers about recycling in Chicago were further fried by virtue of the fact that most waste from African American and Latino wards in this city never even sees the sorting centers; it goes to Allied Waste transfer stations, then to landfills. And it is never counted in the recycling numbers.

There is a bit of vindication here for those of us who—way back in 1995—thought the Blue Bag was actually a greased deal. Back then, the favored beneficiary was WMI; now it is Allied Waste. Otherwise, the story is the same as it ever was in Chicago: garbage and garbage collection is a fountainhead of inside deals and unsavory characters. And as much as we’d like to think recycling is not garbage, in Chicago it is.

What’s going on now?
So now, we are seeing an attempt on the part of the City to re-energize the Blue Bag. And from one perspective, I wish them luck. After all, the more folks that participate and find it lacking, the better to build a constituency for change. Changing the Blue Bag was never possible when no one used it and no one cared. Maybe, just maybe, a new generation of naïve folks might come along and embrace recycling again. A series of grants were just made by the City to community organizations who are trying innovative recycling projects; a pilot project of real source-separated recycling is taking place in the 19th Ward, home of the chair of the City Council’s Environment Committee, Alderman Virginia Rugai. Rugai, Alderman Joe Moore (49th), and several other Council members have raised a few questions about recycling in Chicago. The silence has been broken. The press is on the story again. Change is in the wind.

But alas, I fear my own irrational exuberance. Because we are forgetting the single most important obstacle to recycling in Chicago, and until it is changed, real change is an illusion.

Remember the garbage strike of 2003? When the private haulers went on strike and garbage piled up? Did it pile up at your house? At your business? If it did, then you aren’t served by the City of Chicago’s garbage collection service. Commercial buildings and residential buildings larger than four units have to contract with private scavenger services to collect their garbage. (If you put your garbage in a dumpster or down a chute, this means you.) And although the Recycling Ordinance mandates that private scaven-gers provide recycling, unless you pay extra to have
a real recycling service come get your source-separated recycling (like my naïve Rogers Park building chose to do back in 1995), you’re probably throwing blue bags (not the Blue Bags) into your dumpster. And
the likelihood that those blue bags ever get recycled is very small.

The City of Chicago Department of the Environment was once charged with the enforcement of this section of the Recycling Ordinance. Now it is the purview of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. If you call and complain that you think your scavenger isn’t recycling, and you get action, you’ll be the first I know of to have succeeded. So, all that garbage—way over half of that collected in the city from residents—is just flowing through the garbage river into the arms of the transfer stations and landfills owned by Allied Waste and WMI and the whole sad story starts over again.

If the City wants to get serious about revitalizing recycling, how about tackling this issue? If the Tribune is exposing the cooked books on the recycling numbers, how about pointing out that no numbers are ever seen on how much private hauler waste gets recycled? Streets and Sanitation will cry broke—the amount of inspection and investigation required to insure that everyone is recycling would be a budget buster, for sure. But until every Chicagoan has an opportunity to really recycle, the whole thing is a big dog and pony show. Lucky for the privileged folks in the 19th Ward—they’ll have real recycling. Those building owners who can afford it can buy it for themselves. But the rest of us have to take our chances as we see the trucks come down the alley.

This great city and its residents deserve better than that. So, forgive me if I haven’t thrown a party for the new campaign to increase recycling. It’s up to us to say that the pig in a dress is still a pig and to demand better. If we do, I will retire as the Heartland garbologist. I promise there will never be a fourth Heartland article on recycling. Now, there’s a call to action!

Susan Rans writes and teaches about having faith in cities and faith in the diverse and gifted people who inhabit them. She is currently on the faculty of the Masters of Arts in Community Development Program (MACD) at North Park University. She is passionate about the possibility of sustainable urban communities, places where nothing and no one is wasted, and writes regularly on sustainability issues. She is also affiliated with the Asset Based Community Development Institute, and has recently authored the ABCD workbook Hidden Treasures: Building Community Connections.