Major Struggles with Recycling in Chicago

By Elizabeth Chapa

Coasting on a train back to Union Station, I look back at a large amount of exhaust flowing into the sky coming out a tall concrete cylinder. I was taken back to the southwest side of the Motor City where I attended elementary school. The same tall cylinder chimneys would release their gases into the air during recess. I believed that clouds came from factories. What I later came to learn was that 1; there is a scientific explanation behind how clouds form and 2; this was just one of the ways that humans have been emitting harm into the air we need to live.

Fast forward over a decade, now living in Chicago.

I was surprised by the little reinforcement of recycling in a city that is populated of about 2 something million people. On the border of a lake that I grew up knowing as something sacred now lays toxic at this city’s shoreline. I lived at my current apartment for about a year before a recycling notice of an addition to the garbage alley, which I believe is due to a request by the little cafe next door that was a part tenant to my building.

I was pretty excited that I was now able to recycle at my apartment, or at least hoped that it would actually be collected as recyclable.

There was a week that I was sick with a cold, and had an accumulation of recyclables in my kitchen. It may have been a little over a week at this point, and to think that all of this plastic, paper, etc. would just end up going into a landfill if it were not recycled properly. And take that one step further, what about all the other apartments in Chicago, there are roughly 2.7 million people in the city. The amount of waste just going into the landfills and if you’ve ever driven down 55 going into the suburbs it smells, god knows wtf they are doing there but it is just a contributing factor.

I was serving at a bar in the city during the summer that had an endless deal of bottled beers. On a busy hot Saturday, the door guys would empty a collective amount of giant bins just filled with glass bottles from the patrons into the dumpster. This was so painful for me. I would mention it to people and no one seemed to care about recycling, or even understand why we would recycle.

I think about the amount of cans and bottles that I was fortunate enough to know as something that is recycled growing up. In Michigan, there is the 10 cent deposit in which cans and bottles are refundable for the 10 cent deposit. A little initiative for those to recycle. This was a way sports teams raised money, or how the guy at the local ice rink would collect cans to make a little extra change. Chicago had nothing. They did have a 7 cent tax per bag at stores. I will say it’s not a bad idea and it might work to some level towards the green initiative but in the end, it’s to benefit someone’s pocket and not the planets.

Chicago however still happens to fall under a green city in ranking because of its electricity and transportation use. Hard to believe with the amount of waste witnessed but I will give the public transportation options two thumbs up.