When Mike Condei’s 30-gallon bin gets full of recyclables every week, he lugs it out of the basement in his Pullman home, packs it in his car and schleps the materials to a city drop-off center–one more than a dozen miles away.

“It’s kind of a pain really,” said Condei, 26, an electrical engineer.

Condei lives in a recycling desert–one of the city’s 21 (of 50) wards without blue cart recycling service in which the city picks up recyclables every other week from in-alley blue receptacles.

Without city service, recycling warriors such as Condei have to haul their cans, paper and plastics to recycling drop-off centers throughout the city. Ald. Tom Allen (38th), whose ward encompasses Old Irving Park and Portage Park, which have blue carts available only in some areas, has called a hearing for Monday to discuss the status of the city’s blue cart recycling program.

“If I’m going out on errands, I toss a giant bag of recyclables in my trunk and drop it off in the South Loop or Roseland,” Condei said. Those sites are “crazy packed,” he said, and at times overflowing with recyclables.

Since the city’s blue cart program launched five years ago with a test drive of 700 homes in Beverly, it has expanded to parts or all of 29 wards. About 241,000 households have the service–fewer than half of the total households that are supposed to get blue carts by next year, according to city estimates. Only single-family homes and buildings of four units or fewer get city recycling service. Other high-rise units are mandated by the city to have their own recycling programs, but residents say buildings sometimes skirt the law.

Ald. Allen says it’s “embarrassing” the city doesn’t have recycling in all areas. He says he keeps a 2-inch-thick file of e-mails and letters from ward residents concerning recycling.

“If I could give one theme that runs through all of them: disbelief on the part of constituents,” he said. “They’re at a loss to try to understand in the year 2010 that the most basic and successful and proven method of saving and helping the environment, namely household recycling, doesn’t exist in a large part of the city of Chicago.”

He summoned the heads of the Department of Environment and the Department of Streets and Sanitation to a City Council committee meeting  this month to “explain the failure to implement a basic recycling program” and to extend blue carts to households by Sept. 1.

It doesn’t make much sense that a resident living on the west side of Cicero Avenue in his ward is without a blue cart while another resident just across the street has a blue bin, he said. The hearing, he said, is an attempt to help move the city into the 21st century.

“We’re teaching a whole generation of residents, kids and everyone else that recycling is not important,” he said.

City officials in 2008 said the recycling service would be rolled out to 600,000 homes by 2011.

However, this year there was no money in the budget to expand the blue carts in a city that touts itself as being one of the greenest in America. Residents likely will have to wait until October, when the city’s preliminary budget typically is unveiled, to find out whether the freeze on blue bin expansion will continue.

In the meantime, Mayor Daley on Friday kicked off a two-week-long neighborhood paper drive, encouraging residents to drop off paper, newspapers and magazines at 24 designated locations found on chicagorecycles.org.

There’s no timetable on when the city’s recycling program will be expanded, said Matt Smith, spokesman for the Streets and Sanitation Department. The city recently added three drop-off locations for a total of 33 across the city, he said.

“We’re trying to make sure everybody has recycling options and we’re trying to maintain our basic services and run our operations as efficiently as possible,” Smith said. “As we get down the road, and hopefully we’re looking at a better economic picture, then we can explore enhancing our services.”

Meanwhile, some aldermanic offices have fielded questions from residents who are curious if they’ll get blue carts and be a part of the city’s recycling program.

“They would like them. We would love them to have them. However, the city doesn’t have the money to give them,” said Pam Cummings, Ald. Toni Preckwinkle’s (4th) ward office manager.

She refers residents who live in the ward, which includes Kenwood and Oakland, to use the drop-off site at Washington Park.

Mike Nowak, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, says it’s hard to cut the city slack on recycling when, in his opinion, money was wasted on blue bags for years. A Tribune investigation found that the ’90s-era program–in which recyclables in blue bags went in with the trash–didn’t work. A Tribune investigation found the amount of waste diverted from landfills and recycled was only 8 percent, and not 25 percent like the city claimed. The city introduced separate blue recycling bins in 2005 and finally kicked the bags to the curb in 2008.

“I’m sure the city’s argument is, ‘We need fire, police and education,’ ” Nowak said. “A lot of people believe in the 21st century that recycling is a basic city service like garbage collection and street sweeping.”

[Originally posted by Leonor Vivanco on June 7th 2010 on Redeye]