Monday, March 21, 2005

More Blue Bag Trash Talk

The Trib has been all over the Mayor's blue bag recycling program lately. Here's an excerpt from Sunday's front page article.

"The city has quietly begun allowing nearly 30 percent of Chicago's residential waste to bypass the expensive sorting centers built a decade ago to pull out recyclables. Tons of trash--rich with bottles, cans and newspapers that a few years ago would have been recycled--is now trucked off to landfills.

The city has ignored this river of garbage and recyclables when it computed its statistics, inflating its recycling rate and exaggerating the success of blue bag, the Tribune's investigation has found."

The failure of the blue bags is causing the Mayor's green reputation to wilt faster than a Gerber Daisy in a jam jar.

And those blue Dominick's bags can't be helping. Kudos to the grocery store chain for supporting recycling, but even in my household where we're pretty conscientious about separating our trash and using our blue bags, we completely ignore the Dominick's ones because they're too small.

More often than not they end up in our garbage filled with diapers or dog poop. Once the sorters see a few Dominick's bags like ours, you know they're not looking for anymore of them. Even we filled a few of them with diamonds.

No comments: