For the last four years an uneasy alliance has existed between Uptown Recycling and the Daley administration. During that time the city paid Uptown an average of $50,000 a year to send vans from house to house on the north side, collecting bottles, cans, and newspapers to be recycled. But Uptown’s operators never shied from criticizing the administration’s long-range recycling plans, and city officials privately grumbled that the not-for-profit was operated by a bunch of ideological ingrates who used their press contacts to make Daley look bad.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
At the heart of the dispute is the Daley administration’s controversial blue bag recycling program. Proposed in 1990, the program would encourage residents to store recyclables in large plastic blue bags, which would be collected by city crews along with other garbage. The refuse would then be taken to a transfer station where it would be separated by hand. The garbage would be sent to landfills and the contents of the blue bags to various recycling sites.
The city contends that the program will offer recycling service at the lowest cost. “If we have separate collections for garbage and recyclables that means two sets of trucks going down the alleys and more pollution,” says Henderson. “We have learned that the expansion of such services to all 625,000 households we service is financially prohibitive.”
So on September 10 Alekel-Carlson wrote Henderson another letter, repeating her requests for changes in the contract. “I gave him a deadline,” says Alekel-Carlson. “I told him we had to have an answer by September 24 in order to make our plans.”
But why didn’t you come out and tell them that in your August 27 letter? “I did,” says Henderson. “By not mentioning their demands it is implicit that we are not acceding to them. At that time we were not in a position to meet those demands because the city was facing budget cuts and we didn’t know how much money there would be for recycling.”
Henderson says he hopes bad feelings will ease. “We never wanted them to go out of business,” he says. “We only wanted to make sure that some sort of collection program would continue while we waited for the blue bag to come on-line. I wish them success, even when blue bag is operating. The more recycling alternatives, the better.”
