Chicago bills itself as a world-class city, but when it comes to recycling, its performance has been less than first-rate. What’s gone wrong? Let’s take a deep dumpster dive with our new WTTW News Explains animated segment.
For comparison, places like San Francisco and L.A. claim to keep 80% of their waste out of landfill, while Chicago’s recycling rate has been stubbornly stuck at 9% for years.Chicago’s first try at recycling, back in the 1990s, was the so-called “Blue Bag” program.
Eventually the bags were scrapped and, fast forward to 2007, the city rolled out Blue Carts to much fanfare. But there were issues from the get-go, including holdover skepticism from the bag era. On the surface, single stream seems simple when it truth the business of recycling is anything but. For example, not all plastic — even if stamped with the “recyclable” logo — is accepted by recycling processors. And mixing things like cans of soda, often containing residual liquid, with paper is a recipe for contamination.
Orange stickers began showing up on carts, labeling them as contaminated. With the specter of the Blue Bag program still looming, Chicagoans again wondered: Is anything actually being recycled or did haulers have an incentive to declare carts contaminated?
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