Friday, May 2, 2008

The blue bag program is no more

Well I think it's great that the city is attempting to encourage recycling. At that I wondered how much money the city made by having such a program, especially from recycling plastics and paper. Either way there were complaints about this program not being up to snuff and in some wards blue bags gave way to blue bins.

That's right instead of buying blue bags at your local grocery store you can get blue bins for your recyclables. Something I don't think is a bad idea, however, they only started those in select wards. For instance the 8th Ward was the first to take part in this new program within the last year or so.

Anyway Clout City offers a story about the new program...
City officials offered no lamentations for the program in announcing its demise at a press conference in Uptown. By the end of the summer, they said with pride, blue bags and other recyclable materials will no longer be sorted out of trash collected by city sanitation crews.

Instead, the city will resume its slow expansion of blue cart recycling, in which residents toss their recyclables into a container for separate pickup. An additional 92,000 households will have blue cart recycling by the end of the summer (see map), and all residential buildings with city garbage pickup--those with four or fewer units--will have blue cart recycling by 2011. Areas that already have blue carts have recycled at about triple the rate they did with blue bags.

The city will also begin adding more sites where residents without the service can drop off materials for recycling.

"This is a day to celebrate," said Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner for the Chicago Department of Environment. "We have accomplished much, but we also understand we have a lot of work to do. Our programs and initiatives have earned praise from many in the environmental arena, but the one consistent area of concern has always been recycling."

No comments:

Post a Comment

PLEASE READ FIRST!!!! Comment Moderating and Anonymous Comment Policy

While anonymous comments are not prohibited we do encourage you to help readers identify you so that other commenters may respond to you. Either read the moderating policy for how or leave an identifier (which could be a nickname for example) at the end of the comment.

Also note that this blog is NOT associated with any public or political officials including Alderman Roderick T. Sawyer!