Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Politics / Environment / Clout City / News / Eco Privatize Recycling? It's Pretty Much Already Been Done
Posted by Mick Dumke on 06.16.10 at 04:31 PM
The Sun-Times's Fran Spielman reported Wednesday something that's been rumbling around City Hall for some time: the city may move to privatize curbside recycling because it doesn't have the money to expand its blue cart program citywide.
By "some time" I mean 23 years. It was 1987 when Harold Washington first proposed enlisting private firms to pick up recyclable materials from the 700,000 homes served by city garbage crews.
Washington died before implementing the plan, and in 1989 the new mayor, Richard M. Daley, ditched the idea in favor of a four-ward pilot program that used Streets & San employees to collect recyclables instead.
But within a couple of years he'd ditched that plan too, opting instead for the blue bag program conceived by his friends at the private firm Waste Management. As luck would have it, Waste Management was subsequently hired to fish the blue bags and recyclables out of the trash at a cost to taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars a year.
We know how the blue bag program turned out. So now Mayor Daley is apparently circling back to Mayor Washington's original proposal.
Unions and aldermen are reportedly astir over the plan to privatize curbside recycling, and for obvious reasons. Let's hope they've learned a lesson from the secretive way the city has undertaken privatization over the last few years—from airport security to the parking meters—and that they demand details and transparency this time around.
But "privatizing" the blue cart program really only means that private firms would provide the carts and pick up the recyclables. The rest is already in private hands.
Currently city employees driving city trucks collect the materials every couple weeks. Then they take it to a city-owned garbage sorting facility whose operations have already been outsourced to a private firm, Allied Waste. (Incidentally, the city has been trying to find private firms interested in a long-term lease of its sorting facilities.)
There the materials are loaded onto trucks owned by another private company, Resource Management, and transported to its state-of-the-art sorting center in Chicago Ridge, where they're processed and eventually sent off to other private companies that use the materials to manufacture other products.
Frankly, if the city can't afford to pay for the personnel and equipment needed to provide recycling citywide, it doesn't make sense not to look into Mayor Washington's old idea.
But that's a big "if." It's never been made clear to me exactly why the blue cart program costs as much as the city says it does. The more that's recycled, the less that goes into the trash. So as the city invests in a recycling program it should save on its garbage disposal costs. And that's how it's worked so far. Since 2007 the city's garbage and recycling budget has shrunk from $157 million to $139 million, largely because of personnel cuts but also because of reduced expenses in garbage disposal. But city officials say they're too broke to invest in recycling right now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the debate over how to expand the blue cart program is important but not broad enough. About 80 percent of Chicago's waste is generated from homes and businesses that don't get city sanitation services. Last year Daley administration officials met with environmental advocates, waste haulers, and other stakeholders to try to come up with a comprehensive plan for multi-unit and business recycling, but the talks stalled months ago and there are no indications that they'll be revived soon.
Money is tight, but not all of this is about money.
Comments (6)
Showing 1-6 of 6
As much as I want reasonably-paid unionized city workers to pick up my recyclables, and as much as I want the city to receive the money realized from selling the recyclables, I JUST WANT SOMEBODY TO PICK UP MY G*DAMMED RECYCLABLES! I'm really, really tired of hauling them to the forest preserve. IS IT ASKING TO MUCH TO EXPECT THIS FRICKIN' CITY TO WORK FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LIVE HERE?!!?
[small voice]
Thank you.
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"As much as I want reasonably-paid unionized city workers to pick up my recyclables,"
As far as I know, Videogrrl, all the workers at all the sanitation companies are unionized as well. I seem to recall there being a strike about ten years ago that prevented most people in the whole Chicago area from having their garbage picked up for a few days. Or at least there was a threatened strike that caused people to worry about the possibility. So if you think unionization is required for these workers to be "reasonably-paid" there is no reason whatsoever for them to need to be city workers. And I'm not sure why you care whether the people who pick up your garbage are paid well anyway.
"And I'm not sure why you care whether the people who pick up your garbage are paid well anyway."
We're not all sociopaths like you.
http://www.graphpaper.com/wp/wp-content/up…
Let me explain something to you, FGFM. Let's take three possibilities for the wages the garbage collectors. These possibilities are high wages, modest wages, and lower wages. We won't get into specific numbers or what someone's definition "high", "modest" and "low" are. The definition of lower wages in this example might very well be considered high. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how these things work. When wages are higher it means the costs increase. When the costs increase it causes people to pay more. So if garbage collectors are paid high wages the cost of collection for each homeowner and business would be higher than if they were paid modest wages. The costs would also be higher when these workers are paid modest wages as compared to low wages. There is no free lunch. So I suppose the exact opposite of the part of my comment you quoted would be someone asking "I'm not sure why you care whether residents pay reasonable prices for garbage collection". And someone could just as easily respond to that comment by stating "we're not all sociopaths like you". After all, there are many people struggling to pay bills, to pay for their kids college, or even to pay for their home or their rent. Many of these people would benefit from a little relief in their garbage collection costs. That doesn't mean they should get it. Whenever the cost structure of something like this changes there are going to be some people who will benefit and others who will lose.
And for the record, I never said garbage collectors should not be well-paid. I didn't even state an opinion on it at all. All I did was ask Videogrrl why she cared whether her garbage collectors were paid-well. The reality is that garbage collectors are going to be paid good wages no matter what. It is not a job that most people gravitate to so they need to pay reasonably high wages in order to attract workers and reduce turnover. Market forces take care of that. And since all the market conditions cause the workers to be able to successfully unionize it means that they will likely be paid even more than otherwise.
"Let me explain something to you, FGFM. Let's take three possibilities for the wages the garbage collectors."
Tell it to Thomas Friedman.
i am tired of hearing about this cities problems concerning recycling. Yall need to get your politicians in line. Recycling is an easy problem.
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