Late last month, under the leadership of Chicago’s Chief Sustainability Officer Angela Tovar and on behalf of Mayor Lightfoot, the City released the 2021 City of Chicago Waste Strategy (executive summary here). This report was created in collaboration with the Delta Institute, a local consulting firm specializing in municipal solid waste management planning. UIC provided analysis and the current condition assessment that informed the proposed strategies. This renewed attention is great to see, especially considering Chicago’s shameful claim to the worst big-city recycling rate. The plan offers a mix of concrete steps to reduce, mitigate, and divert waste, while others remain a bit vague. The broad aim is to “minimize landfilling, increase diversion and recycling, reduce cost, and increase efficiency, maximize economic investment and work and environmental justice inequities.” The City is also (supposedly) “committed to working with our partners, businesses, sister agencies, residents, institutions, and environmental leaders who are committed to achieving a zero-waste future.”

Obviously, the City will need a significant effort to improve its abysmal recycling and waste record. And it’s incredibly frustrating, to say the least, to learn that even if you are recycling properly your recycling may be headed to the landfill instead – which a 2018 Better Government Association investigation found Waste Management was doing by diverting a significant amount of supposedly “contaminated” recyclables into the garbage (which, coincidentally, profited WM). Thankfully, the City appears to finally not only be willing to recognize this issue but also to rectify it. Earlier this year, the Department of Streets and Sanitation (DSS) eschewed Waste Management and opted for a 3-year contract with a competitor, LRS, for residential recycling. LRS “possess[es] more recycling assets than any other Company in the Chicago area, including a state-of-the-art single-stream recycling facility that can sort cardboard, mixed-paper, glass, steel, other metals and plastics” (note, however, that per this Report the City is considering abandoning the single-stream recycling system in favor of a multi-stream system). LRS is committed to collecting recycling with less than 50% of contamination. There will be no change in areas where DSS services blue carts.

DSS and the Chicago Department of Public Health also received a grant from the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) to work on food waste reduction in 2021, a part of the NRDC’s Food Matters initiative partnering with cities to achieve meaningful reductions in food waste through comprehensive policies and programs. You can read more about the NRDC’s initiatives in the Midwest here. Side note: the NRDC also received a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund last year to accelerate climate action.

The report follows a series of “Guiding Principles” that demonstrate a broader concern for climate change and environmental equity:

• Reframe Chicago’s materials as resources, instead of waste: This encompasses including sustainable materials management practices in Chicago’s climate mitigation and adaptation strategies; changing existing perceptions using educational programs; configuring Chicago’s materials management system away from disposal; and shifting materials interventions upstream to capture value and materials before they enter any waste stream.
• Center equity and environmental justice in program design: Consider neighborhood-specific impacts; prevent unintended consequences; and avoid creating additional burdens for low-to-moderate-income (LMI) Chicagoans.
• Identify opportunities for establishing internal and external partnerships: Clarify and documenting the role of City offices to determine how to improve coordination; partner with early organizational adopters already pushing innovation in waste reduction; and identify how the City can create the conditions to sustain impactful partnerships and a more participatory materials management system.
• Prioritize initiatives with revenue potential, no/low cost, or a positive return on investment when applied at scale: Identify opportunities for economic benefit, revenue generation, and additional cost savings through materials management; consider budget realities to develop realistic strategies; and prioritize critical investment needs to meet identified goals.
• Identify opportunities to include goal setting, metrics, and data sharing to demonstrate progress and increase transparency: Develop opportunities to share data and resources with the community; prioritize routing, equitable stakeholder engagement; and establish goals and metrics for success and how those metrics will be realistically evaluated.
• Equip consumers with the education and tools needed to drive innovation in evolving waste systems: Consider investments in public education; prioritize stakeholder engagement; and highlight opportunities for Chicago to act as a national leader in sustainability.

I have to say, even these guiding principles are ambitious – but hopefully not unrealistically so. For Chicago to act as a “national leader in sustainability,” considering its current track record, will take enormous change and a shift in mindset. It is good to see a recognition of the inequitable nature of climate change and its effects and an effort to address these inequities in the waste management strategy going forward.

Before moving into priorities and implementation, the report provides an Existing Conditions Report, Waste Characterization and Generation Update Report, Peer City Analysis, and Materials Management Strategies.

The meat of the plan offers a number (63, to be exact) of Materials Management Strategies to be considered, presenting those strategies determined to be optimal (more complex and demanding), practical (can be readily implemented at full scale), and pilot (strategies ready for site-specific implementation). The strategies are also categorized according to projected cost (low, mid, or high range).

The Plan then delineates short-term priorities for 2021 and 2022, but no specific targets or deadlines (Evanston, by contrast, has an immediate goal of reaching a 50% waste diversion rate by 2025). However, one promising goal is to provide compostable food drop-off locations by the end of the year. Still, this will require significant public education in conjunction with the actual infrastructure in order to actually be effective.

The short-term priorities for 2021-2022 fall under three categories: Policy Review and Exploration, Increasing Opportunities for Community Interventions, and Strengthening Internal Operations. Notable among these priorities are:

• Policy Review and Exploration: The City seeks to review existing materials management ordinances to identifyopportunities to increase impact and conduct initial research for new potential legislation.
  • Research potential for implementing waste hauling zones for commercial waste
  • Support ambitious statewide extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation
  • Assess Construction & Demolition Debris (C&D) Recycling Ordinance compliance and identifying opportunities for increased contractor education
  • Adjust the C&D Recycling Ordinance to specify targeted material types and parameters for reuse
• Increasing Opportunities for Community Interventions: The City seeks to provide new programs and educational opportunities for residents to engage with the materials management system and improve residential diversion.
  • Leverage the NRDC Food Matters Great Lakes Regional Cohort to pilot food waste prevention and recycling programs
  • Maintain clear and consistent messaging around recycling contamination
  • Introduce organics drop off locations through seasonal “pumpkin smash” events
  • Develop a directory of participating retail take-back options for e-waste and household hazardous waste (HHW)
  • Establish a revenue-sharing partnership with a textile recycling company for collection of clothes, shoes, and other textiles otherwise ending up in landfills
• Strengthening Internal Operations: The City seeks to improve internal operations related to materials management to increase efficiency across departments and improve waste diversion in the City.
  • Identify appropriate Blue Cart to black cart distribution and bin size options
  • Improve high density residential recycling ordinance compliance
  • Improve the existing yard waste collection program and incorporate potential food scrap “ride along” options

In addition, some potential longer-term strategies that stick out to me are:

• Decreasing contamination in recycling and introducing additional recycling streams (the current single-stream recycling system is more expensive and has more contamination)
• Better enforcement of recycling violations
• Implementing city-run commercial recycling (currently they contract privately)
• More Blue Bin education (what is actually accepted)
• Reevaluating the number, size, and distribution of black and blue carts. A “Pay As You Throw” model may even be implemented (paying for bigger trash bins), which is advocated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and adopted by communities across the country.
• Clothing and textile recycling: “establishing a revenue-sharing partnership with a textile recycling company for collection of clothes, shoes, and other textiles otherwise ending up in landfills.”
• Update the 2013 Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance to add waste tracking requirements for large commercial buildings
• Support ambitious statewide extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation “requir[ing] manufacturers to take financial responsibility for the end-of-life recovery or safe disposal of their products.”
• Establish a grant program for development of secondary markets
• Deprioritize waste incineration and Waste to Energy (W2E) operations until further research and technology development.
• Leverage the NRDC Food Matters Great Lakes Regional Cohort “to conduct a food rescue assessment of existing infrastructure and gaps”
• Expand material types available for collection and diversion through the HCCRF and rebrand the facility as a Chicago Recycling Center and increase access
• Increase residential organic waste and food scrap collection services
• Promoting and creating infrastructure for composting

This post was written with help and insights from an article recently published by WBEZ authored by Monica Eng. Monica is sadly moving on from WBEZ, but as a longtime follower and admirer I am excited to see what she will accomplish next!