In April Mayor Daley celebrated Earth Week by reviewing the city’s environmental accomplishments in a speech at the Daley Center Plaza. The mayor, whose environmentalism was applauded in the issue of Vanity Fair that had just hit the newsstands, told the crowd of about 100 he was proud of Chicago’s international reputation for green construction, tree planting, and water conservation. “The city is leading by example–I as mayor can’t just get up here and tell you what you should do,” he said. “We’ve shown that our commitment to the environment is good for nature and good for the taxpayers.”
Even Daley supporters are mystified by the city’s lack of commitment to recycling. Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, who helped write several of Chicago’s recycling laws as an aldermanic aide in the early 90s, says, “It’s an enigma–an otherwise great, green mayor being so terrible on recycling.”
Recycling programs took off in the late 80s and early 90s, and in Illinois the amount of garbage sent to state landfills dropped for several years even though people were throwing more out. But by 1992 Chicago was recycling only 13 to 19 percent of its commercial garbage and virtually nothing from residences. Today the numbers aren’t much more impressive.
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So let’s stick to what the EPA calls municipal solid waste–regular old residential and business garbage, a stew of packing materials, old appliances, used tires, worn-out clothing, newspapers, food, grass, and leaves. According to the EPA, in 2003 paper made up 35 percent by weight of the nation’s municipal solid waste; food 12 percent; yard waste 12 percent; plastics 11; metals 8; rubber, leather, and cloth combined, about 7; wood 6; glass 5; and everything else about 3. People recycled 83 percent of newspaper, 71 percent of cardboard, and 56 percent of office paper, but only 32 percent of junk mail and almost no napkins, milk cartons, or paper cups. Add up the numbers and only about 48 percent of all paper was recycled. That’s still a lot more than other materials: 19 percent of glass, 36 percent of metal, and 5 percent of plastics. Another 56 percent of yard waste and 3 percent of food waste were kept out of landfills because they were composted. Altogether, Americans recycled about a quarter of their municipal solid waste.
One reason Chicago’s recycling effort stalled is that the landfill crisis never materialized here, because private waste haulers opened new dumps in west-suburban Geneva and downstate Pontiac and Dixon, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana. By the end of 2004 Illinois had 51. Ten of them were in the nine-county Chicago area, though none in the city itself, and at the end of this year the region will have eight. But there’s still room: in 2004 state landfills had space for nearly 300 million more tons of garbage, and plans are in place to expand at least some of them. Also the price of landfilling in the Chicago area never rose as dramatically as experts predicted 20 years ago, when it cost $20 a ton; today it’s $35 to $50 a ton, not much higher when you factor in inflation.
First let’s take what are known as low-density residential properties–homes and apartment buildings with four or fewer units, plus public buildings such as schools–because it’s easier to understand everything else if you understand them. In 2003, the last year for which the city has detailed figures, these buildings generated 1.2 million tons of trash, or just under 24 percent of the 5.1 million total tons of municipal solid waste. This is the garbage picked up by Streets and San (a service that cost taxpayers at least $165 million last year). These are the residents who, if they choose, can participate in the notorious Blue Bag program.
In October 1993 Mayor Daley announced that Waste Management had won the contract to build and run the MRRFs with a goal of diverting a minimum of 25 percent of the trash it picked up. He also announced that the costs of building the MRRFs–three on city property, one on Waste Management land–had more than doubled, to $60 million.
