Chicago Blue Bag Program A Bust, Study Says

Participation in the city of Chicago's blue bag recycling program is much lower than Mayor Richard Daley's administration has claimed for years, according to the only recent citywide study.

Although officials have long said that almost one-third of households put recyclables into blue bags, the citywide participation rate in 2003 was just 13.3 percent, according to a study conducted by the Streets and Sanitation Department.

The study, marked "internal document," was never made public but was obtained by the Tribune under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The survey results are another example of how the city's blue bag program is not always what it seems.

Last week, Lake County, Ind., officials issued a cease-and-desist order when they learned that "recycled" material was being tilled into farmland there. That highlighted the largely unknown fact that the majority of what the city claims is recycled material is yard waste mixed with small bits of plastic, glass and metal.

The new revelations come as City Hall readies a pilot program in the Beverly neighborhood that abandons blue bags altogether in favor of a suburban-style program with separate pickups for garbage and recyclables.

But the city is hardly giving up on blue bag recycling: It just launched a $740,000 marketing campaign to boost participation. The contract went to MK Communications, a firm run by Daley confidant Marilyn Katz.

Under the city's recycling program, households are encouraged to put glass, plastic, metal and paper into blue plastic bags that are then piled in with other refuse in the back of city garbage trucks. At waste stations, workers are supposed to sort out the blue bags and send them to be recycled.

The rest of the garbage is then sorted by workers and machines, which pull out more recyclables that were never put into blue bags.

The point of the blue bags is to make the sorting more efficient.

For years it has been difficult to determine how many Chicagoans participate. Studies done by the city's Environment Department showed participation declining from 34 percent in 1998 to 28 percent in 2001.

Since then, city officials have said that the most reliable figure was about 30 percent.

They cited that figure at a recent City Council committee meeting, where Alderman Joe Moore repeatedly asked Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez and Assistant Commissioner James Conlon for the blue bag participation rate.

Both Sanchez and Conlon made reference to the 2003 study but did not give the results. Instead, Conlon cited the Environment Department as finding the level of participation at "30 percent."

"The surveys tell us that people are interested in our blue bag recycling program," Conlon said. "They use a huge number of blue bags. We collect a huge number of recyclables, but there is always room for improvement."

"It's difficult to do a survey because some wards might see 60 percent participation and then [in] some wards you see 2.2 percent," Sanchez said. "We have to be doing a better job of educating people about the importance of recycling using blue bags."

The 2003 report, which was addressed directly to Sanchez, lists no wards with participation rates over 30 percent, however. The results of the study ranged from a 29.49 percent participation rate in the 47th Ward on the North Side to below 2 percent for the 37th, 20th and 22nd Wards.

The survey was "a reasonable estimate of residents who recycle at least once a month," according to a memo to Sanchez that accompanied the report.

A Streets and Sanitation Department spokesman said last week that the 2003 survey was "not a thorough, scientific study." He said another study is in the works.

Determining how much recycled material arrives in blue bags is just as difficult as figuring out how many households participate in the program. Figures released by the city in the mid-1990s indicated then that only 2 or 3 percent of the garbage collected by the city came in blue bags.

But as the program went on, city officials stopped compiling such data.

The situation does not appear to have changed much. An official for Chicago's recycling contractor said workers at a South Side waste station fill one tractor-trailer each week with recyclable material packed in blue bags. That's less than 2 percent of the residential garbage that the station handles.

Alderman Ricardo Munoz was not surprised to learn that relatively few Chicagoans separate recyclables and bag them apart from other garbage.

"It all comes back to the issue that people just don't trust the system," he said. "There is no end game in sight. You put [blue bags] into trucks with the garbage, with the spoiled milk, the stale tortillas, the rice, the dirty diapers.

"People say, `Why should I go to the trouble to segregate my recycling from other garbage if the city won't segregate it?'"

Those worries apparently are not misplaced, judging by the scene recently at a South Side waste station operated by Allied Waste Transportation Inc., Chicago's recycling contractor.

Accompanied by officials from Allied and the Streets and Sanitation Department, Chicago Tribune reporters saw a front-end loader flatten 10-foot-high mounds of garbage at the facility on 110th Street. Two workers waded into the pile to pick out blue bags.

Virtually none of the few blue plastic bags that dotted the garbage pile were intact. The shredded bags were then put into a truck apart from other garbage.

As workers carried the bags, recyclables spilled out. One bag yielded a cascade of green bottles, which clanked against the floor and stayed in the mound with the rest of the garbage destined for landfills.

Shreds of a blue plastic bag were twisted around the arm of the front-end loader, flapping as it moved the garbage around.

The loader bucket lifted waste that appeared to include filled blue bags into a Dumpster bound for a landfill.

Less than two weeks after the Tribune visit, on Dec. 29, the Environment Department issued a press release that said a routine inspection found Allied was "failing to properly segregate recyclable material from the waste stream" at that facility.

The inspection report tells a different story--that the inspection was far from routine. It shows that the Environment Department inspector visited the Allied facility on orders from the department's commissioner, who received a complaint from the Streets and Sanitation Department.

The inspection report included a color photograph of a trucker holding up a blue bag that was placed with garbage that was dumped in a landfill.