Daley defends cuts in Chicago's curbside recycling program

Mayor Daley, who prides himself on becoming Chicago's "environmental mayor," today defended his controversial decision to cut back on curbside recycling.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that Mayor Daley’s tough-times, 2010 budget includes no funding to continue the citywide switch to suburban-style blue cart recycling that was supposed to be completed by 2011 in all 600,000 households that get city garbage pick-up.

Under the mayor’s plan, some of the 240,000 households that already have blue carts will see less frequent pick-ups: from every other week currently to every three weeks.

Daley defended the cutbacks.

“They’re not being slowed down. It’s just [bringing] a lot of common sense” to it, he said.

“The blue cart — it’ll be picked up. But you’re trying to figure out how much you’re picking up. If someone throws out one pound of recycled material every two weeks — about [an inch or two] in a 50-gallon drum, then you’re wondering why you’re picking it up once every two weeks. You have to evaluate that. That’s common sense. That’s called business-sense.”

Mike Nowak, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, has called the recycling retreat a bitter pill to swallow after Chicago’s failed, decade-long experiment with blue-bag recycling.

Nowak argued that, if people are recycling as much as they should, blue carts should fill up as quickly as black carts used for regular garbage, which are picked up weekly.

“It’s hard to tell people to recycle more if you’re picking it up less,” Nowak said last week.

With recycling pick-ups every three weeks, Nowak said he’s concerned about “recycling spilling into alleyways. . . . Either that or people will stop doing it. We have two options, both of which are bad.”