Conscious Choice: The Good, the Bad, and the Blue Bag

October 2002

The Good, the Bad, and the Blue Bag

by Dave Aftandilian

Over the past several years, recycling rates have been dropping across the country. Waste News, which conducts an annual survey of municipal recycling programs, cites declining interest and cheaper landfill rates as the main causes. Another major factor is that markets for many recycled goods have been depressed.

Here in Chicago, participation rates in the city’s Blue Bag recycling program have been slipping too, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported in August. In 1998, 34 percent of those eligible to use the Blue Bag program chose to do so, but in 2001, only 28 percent used it. Overall recycling rates for the city also decreased, from 47.9 to 44.9 percent. The Sun-Times noted that these rates would have been even lower if they had not included an "astonishing 96,000 percent increase in the amount of recycled construction steel used in the city since 1996 — from 801 tons to 773,000 tons.... By including [this figure], the city masked a steep drop in the recycling of traditional commodities — including paper, glass, plastic, and aluminum. Recycling of those products dropped to 594,000 tons, nearly half of the amount just three years ago."

Now that the bloom is off the recycling rose, some have asked whether we shouldn’t just give up on recycling entirely. New York City recently suspended collection of glass and plastic recyclables to help close its budget deficit, for instance. Thankfully, instead of dropping programs such as the Blue Bag, the City of Chicago is working on ways to increase participation in them and run them more efficiently. "To reduce costs related to managing recycling waste...without compromising recycling rates," as Chicago Environment Commissioner Marcia Jiménez put it, the city has decided to open the Blue Bag sorting contract currently held by Waste Management, which expires this coming February, to a competitive bid. The bid opened September 6, and the sealed bids will be opened on October 11.

The Blue Bag, Then and Now

The city’s opening of a bid on the Blue Bag sorting contract offers us a perfect opportunity to take a long, hard look at the program, thinking about where it has succeeded and where it has failed, and how it might be improved. Ever since the Blue Bag program was first proposed in the early 1990s, it has been controversial. People who attended the initial public comment meetings have told me that even though the public was almost universally opposed to the program, the city pushed ahead with it anyway.

At the time, many people felt that Waste Management, Incorporated (WMI), which won the first competitive bid for the sorting contract in 1993, had an inordinate influence on the shape of the Blue Bag program. For instance, Jo Patton, Executive Director of the Chicago Recycling Coalition from 1990 to 1992, told me that the Request for Proposals (RFP) that the city published significantly limited which companies could bid; the technology it described was very narrow, and matched only what WMI did. Off the record, a number of the other companies that bid on the contract felt the RFP had been written specifically with WMI in mind, or at least with a great awareness of how WMI operates. For these and other reasons, Patton says she "believes that the Department of Streets and Sanitation sat down with Waste Management prior to the issuance of the RFP, and that Waste Management helped significantly in developing a concept for the Blue Bag program."

Other evidence also points to close ties between the Daley administration and WMI at the time. In fact, a corporate watchdog group writes on their Web site that "William Daley, brother to the mayor, served on the board of directors of Wheelabrator, a WMX [Waste Management] subsidiary — at least until his recent appointment as U.S. commerce secretary [under Clinton].... Mayor Daley’s chief of staff represented WMX in negotiations on Chicago’s recycling program and Daley’s wife participates in charity work with the spouses of WMX executives" [Waste Management changed its name to WMX for part of the 1990s, then later went back to its old name].

Setting aside the question of how much influence WMI had on the shape of the Blue Bag program, let’s look at how the program works today. Anyone whose trash is collected by the Department of Streets and Sanitation may use the Blue Bag program; this includes single-family homes and two-, three-, or four-flat apartments. Jessica Rio, spokesperson for the Chicago Department of the Environment, says this works out to about 660,000 households, which produce 25 percent of Chicago’s total waste stream. To participate, all residents have to do is put their paper recyclables into one blue bag; cans, glass, and plastic in another; and yard waste in a third. They then place these blue bags in with their regular trash bags in the black bin provided by the city.

The bins are picked up curbside or in the alleys, and the trash bags and blue bags are dumped together into city collection trucks, which deliver them to one of four sorting centers. At the sorting centers, the blue bags are separated from the rest of the waste. Workers also sort through the trash to recover recyclables. Clean and dirty (contaminated with trash) recyclables are then bundled together and sold by WMI. WMI is required by its sorting contract to divert at least 25 percent of the recyclables from the waste stream; the contract sets penalties for falling below this rate, and provides incentives for doing better. WMI gets to keep whatever money it makes from selling these recyclables.

Weighing the Blue Bag

On the plus side, "the Blue Bag program affords Chicagoans the opportunity to very simply put all materials that can be recycled or reused in one bag at home," as Chicago Environment Commissioner Marcia Jiménez told me. In addition to its ease of use, the program imposes smaller collection costs for the city than many programs that involve separate collection of recyclables and trash.

The Blue Bag program has diverted a lot of the city’s waste from landfills — 1.6 million tons’ worth since the program started in December 1995, according to Chicago Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez.The overall recycling rate reported by Chicago for last year was 44.9 percent — better than Seattle (42 percent) and just behind San Francisco (46 percent), whose recycling programs are two of the best in the country.

If this sounds a bit too good to be true to you, that’s because it is. The Chicago Recycling Coalition (CRC) did a study earlier this year using the city’s own recycling statistics. They discovered that the "commodities" we normally think of as recyclables — cans, glass, plastic, and paper — have never accounted for more than 10 percent of the city’s annual Blue Bag recycling. If you add in wood and loose yard waste, the "traditional recyclables" rate for the city’s Blue Bag program goes up to between 10 and 13 percent.

Much of the rest of the Blue Bag program’s so-called "recyclables" consist of "screened yard waste" — material that falls through a 3/16-inch screen while recyclables are sorted from trash at the sorting centers. While much of this waste is organic, it also includes broken glass, paper clips, batteries, and other items. As a result, the Illinois EPA has severely limited the uses to which it can be put; much of it ends up capping one of the city’s landfills on the southeast side. Because it’s not in the landfill, but on it, the city still counts this waste as "recyclable."

This brings us to one of the biggest problems with the Blue Bag program — downcycling. Because so many Chicagoans do not put their recyclables into blue bags, WMI has to commingle "clean" recyclables from blue bags with "dirty" recyclables from trash to come up with even the less than 10 percent diversion rate for commodities that the program manages. (The new sorting contract the city just put out for bid requires a minimum of 12 percent diversion rate.) As you might expect, mixing ketchup-stained paper with clean paper reduces both to the lowest grade of paper, whose potential uses are very limited, and which therefore draws the lowest price.

Downcycling wouldn’t be as much of a problem if more people actually participated in the Blue Bag program. Compared to source-separated recycling programs, the current Blue Bag participation rate of 28 percent is dismal. For instance, on a recent episode of WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, Brooke Beale, director of the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County, said his curbside, source-separated recycling programs have a 70 to 80 percent participation rate. Mike Mitchell of the Illinois Recycling Association told me that Kane and Lake Counties, both of which have source-separated recycling programs, have 80 to 90 percent participation rates. And Seattle’s source-separated program boasts a greater than 95 percent participation rate for residential households, and around 80 percent for apartment buildings.

Betsy Vandercook, president of the CRC, thinks there are several reasons more Chicagoans don’t participate in the Blue Bag program. For one thing, people don’t want to put a lot of work into separating their recyclables from the trash when they see the bags thrown right back together again in the same trash truck. The fact that people have to buy their own blue bags is also a big disincentive; it’s a hassle, and not all grocery or convenience stores carry them.

Fixing the Blue Bag

I was surprised, but quite pleased, to find that many of the potential improvements to the Blue Bag program that Vandercook suggested to me are options that the Department of the Environment is already investigating. For instance, one obvious way to improve the Blue Bag program would be to make it more similar to source-separated recycling programs, which keep trash away from recyclables throughout the waste stream, simplifying the sorting process and increasing the value of the recyclables recovered. Vandercook suggested that the city try a pilot program in several neighborhoods with the highest participation rates, using split trucks (which have separate compartments for recyclables and trash) or separate trucks; instead of buying the split trucks all at once, the city could replace old trucks as they wear out with new, split trucks.

Commissioner Jiménez said that the city is conducting a pilot project in fifteen Chicago public schools this fall (which will later expand to include all the Chicago public schools) to set up separate dumpsters for and collection of food waste and recyclable paper: "we’re looking at separating that out right at the building itself to make sure food waste doesn’t contaminate recyclable paper."

Jiménez didn’t say whether the city was considering composting the food waste, but it certainly should. The Resource Center has been collecting and composting food waste from the University of Chicago for years now, and making the compost available to urban gardeners. There’s no reason the city couldn’t contract with someone to do the same for food waste from the Chicago Public Schools. Jiménez said the city would "learn opportunities for greater efficiencies from this pilot and apply the lessons learned to other areas" — could this mean the city might actually be considering moving to source-separated recycling?

Vandercook also thought that giving away blue bags to residents would help increase recycling participation rates. In its "State of Recycling Report 2001," the city reported results of a pilot program they ran last spring in two neighborhoods to test this theory. They provided six free blue bags each month for three months to all eligible households. Average participation increased 10.55 percent in one area and 18.29 percent in the other. Giving away blue bags free to all households would probably cost more than the city could afford. But the city could take its cue from St. Peters, Missouri, the only other place in the country with a recycling program like Chicago’s Blue Bag. Mike Mitchell of the Illinois Recycling Association told me that St. Peters distributes boxes of recycling bags every quarter to all residents. So far as the average person is concerned, these bags are "free," but the cost of providing them is recouped by the town as part of larger bills for city services or tax assessments.

Key to improving participation in the Blue Bag program is better educating people about it. Commissioner Jiménez said the city is "committed to spending more time, effort, and money on education" about the Blue Bag program, including more radio and TV ads if the city can afford them, and continuing one-on-one education via the Blue Bag Ambassadors. The pilot program in the Chicago Public Schools will have an educational component to encourage students to recycle at home. Vandercook suggests a low-cost educational tool: printing the instructions about what can be recycled in blue bags on the boxes the blue bags come in.

Finally, to make recycling really work, we need to stimulate markets for the recyclables we collect. The Department of the Environment has been working with World Business Chicago to investigate what kinds of companies are already present in the region, or could be attracted to Chicago, to manufacture goods using our recyclables. According to Commissioner Jiménez, this "makes good economic sense for the businesses and good environmental sense for making Chicago a more livable place," partly by reducing pollution from trucking the recyclables to other parts of the country. David Doig, General Superintendent of the Chicago Park District, is also committed to buying park furniture produced here in Chicago, much of which could be made from recycled materials.

Recycling for the Future

There’s only so much the city can do to improve the Blue Bag program; so long as the program commingles trash and recyclables in the same household trash carts and city collection trucks, few people will participate in it, and the quality of the recyclables it recovers will remain poor. Over the long term, Chicago should work toward replacing the Blue Bag with a source-separated residential recycling program, and encourage composting of food and yard waste.

In the meantime, we can all do our parts by recycling and composting at home. Make sure the places you work have adequate recycling plans, and tell the City that we want a better residential recycling plan than the Blue Bag.

Be a Bag Nag: What You Can Do

(courtesy of Chicago Recycling Coalition, Citizens for a Better Environment, and the Resource Center)

1) Call or write Mayor Daley to let him know what you think of the Blue Bag program, and what should be done to improve it. You can reach the Mayor’s Office of Information and Inquiry at 312-744-5000; write to him at: Mayor Richard M. Daley, City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle, Room 507, Chicago, IL, 60602; or send him an e-mail via the web.

2) Write a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and/or your community newspaper. Be sure to include your name, address, and daytime telephone number, even if you send your letter by e-mail. Send your letters to: Voice of the People, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan, Chicago, IL, 60611, e-mail: ctc-TribLetter@Tribune.com, or Letters to the Editor, Chicago Sun-Times, 401 N. Wabash, Chicago, IL, 60611, e-mail: letters@suntimes.com.

3) Take your recyclables to one of the nonprofit Resource Center’s recycling drop-off sites; they will keep your carefully separated recyclables separate and as uncontaminated as possible during processing so that they can be reused or recycled into the greatest variety of materials. The North Park Village (5801 N. Pulaski, near intersection of Peterson & Pulaski) site is open daily 9:00 am to 5:00 pm; Wrightwood Neighbors Recycling (2600 N. Lincoln, in 7-11 parking lot at intersection of Lincoln, Wrightwood, and Sheffield) is open daily 7:00 am to 9:00 pm; Uptown Recycling Station (4716 N. Sheridan) is open Mon., Tues., and Thursday through Saturday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm; and the Railyard Buyback Center on the south side (1325 E. 70th St.) is open daily 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. For more information, including what materials are accepted at these sites, call the Resource Center at 773-821-1351.

4) If you live in a five-flat or larger residential building or a business that does not provide recycling, discuss the matter with the building management. If they still refuse to recycle, call the Chicago Department of Environment’s recycling hotline at 312-744-1614.

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