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“As far as the city is concerned, there has to be more recycling. There has to be recycling in everyone’s home and in every business. That’s all part of it. Whether it’s on the CTA, or on the Metra, or in a city park, there needs to be the ability to recycle. It needs to become everyone’s choice to do it and to make it better. We need to find ways to recycle absolutely everything, to keep it all out of landfills.”
Meanwhile, as the pilot programs get under way, city taxpayers continue to pour money into the underperforming Blue Bag program, which ends up landfilling millions of tons of trash that could be recycled. In the last year the city has paid nearly $60 million to Waste Management to process trash and extract recyclable materials from it, according to city records. More than $22 million of that sum went toward the use of garbage storage and transfer facilities that weren’t designed for sifting out recyclable materials.
