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The city just began offering curbside recycling to single-family homes and residential buildings with four or fewer units in the North Side’s 46th and 47th wards. This means 7 of the city’s 50 wards now have ditched the low-performing Blue Bag program in favor of the Blue Cart pilot. In the new program, residents in homes and “low-density” apartments and condos put all of their recyclable commodities–paper, glass, plastic, and metal–into a single blue cart (which they literally place at the curb in some areas, and in the alleys next to their trash bins in others). City crews pick up the materials every two weeks and take them to a high-tech sorting center in south suburban Chicago Ridge. The materials are separated and then shipped off to manufacturers for reuse.
Of course, the single-family homes and smaller apartment and condo buildings served by Streets and San crews only account for about a fourth of Chicago’s garbage. More than half of the remaining 75 percent comes from residential buildings with five or more units, whose contracts with private waste haulers rarely include effective recycling programs.
