At City Council budget hearings, Deputy Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Chris Sauve said changes are coming to a recycling program that has been stuck in the mud for years. Recycling contracts with Waste Management and SIMS Metal Management that expired years ago, only to be extended a year at a time, have finally been re-bid. The deadline is Nov. 30. New three-year contracts will be awarded, effective Jan. 1, complete with rigorous reporting requirements and penalties for missed pickups.
At the same time, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has asked the Delta Institute to study waste and recycling practices in other major cities and propose a “checklist of things that have been successful elsewhere.” On Friday, Sauve gave aldermen a bit of a preview. “One of the bigger things that we need to do and need to incorporate is more organics, more composting. That would almost immediately double the [recycling] number overnight,” said Sauve, who is spearheading the city’s recycling efforts.
“Food scrap collection is probably the next big thing most people are looking at. … Ideas like that are … what Delta’s review is gonna inform us on. … The thing that’s been trending the last year or so has been the area of plastics. What plastics are acceptable and not acceptable?”
Streets and Sanitation Commissioner John Tully said Chicago’s “biggest contaminants are yard waste and plastics that cannot be recycled.” “The other issue is the way we pick up garbage in Chicago. The fact that we pick up mattresses and anything that’s left outside of the cart — that’s all included in our total waste stream,” Tully said.