Thousands of blue recycling carts — with a pricetag of nearly $1 million — are stashed away in a Far South Side warehouse because City Hall bought them to make the citywide switch to curbside recycling, but ran out of money one-third of the way through.
The Daley administration acknowledged having a stockpile of “roughly 22,000 carts” at a cost of $45-per-container.
The stacks of recycling carts run 25-deep for at least a block at a city warehouse at 900 E. 103rd. Ald. Joe Moore (49th) called the stash “embarrassing” and a “colossal waste of money.”
Streets and Sanitation employees who’ve eyeballed the stash insist the actual number is far greater. They say the stacks of carts run 25-deep for at least a block at a warehouse at 900 E. 103rd St. shared by several city departments.
Ald. Joe Moore (49th) called the stash “embarrassing” and a “colossal waste of money.”
“The fact that they have all these blue carts in storage is just an indictment of the city’s failure to live up to its commitment to bring recycling to two-thirds of the city,” Moore said.
“The best solution is just to expand the program and use the darn carts. It’s a matter of priorities. This should be a priority.”
Ald. Tom Allen (38th) said he has no problem with the stockpile, adding, “Nobody saw this perfect storm of economic meltdown coming. I assume they bought ‘em in bulk, which gives you a better price.”
But, he said, “Having the carts is the cheap part of the equation. The real sore point is that we are treating citizens in different regions of the city unequally. We have to find a way to get this done. If we can’t, we should just repeal the program and go back to do-it-yourself recycling.”
Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith said the last shipment of 3,000 blue carts was purchased from Chicago United Industries in March, 2009 “at least seven months before we announced there would not be additional funding in our 2010 budget” for curbside recycling now stuck at 241,000 households.
“Having these carts on hand also will give us more freedom to look at expanding this program in the future if the economy eases,” Smith said.
Two years ago, Chicago gave up the ghost on blue-bag recycling after more than a decade of failure. Under that system, residents were told to put their recyclables in special blue bags that were picked up by regular garbage crews.
By the end of 2011, City Hall declared that every one of the 600,000 Chicago households with city garbage pick-ups would make the switch to suburban-style curbside recycling from blue carts, which are emptied by separate crews. The expansion has since ground to a halt.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that Daley was exploring the possibility of privatizing household recycling — as recommended two years ago by his 21st Century Commission — to shave as much as $40 million off the $60 million annual cost.
What happens to the stockpile of blue carts if the service is farmed out?
“Maybe they sell ‘em to the private company at a discount. Or maybe they paint ‘em black,” and distribute them for non-recyclables, Moore said.
Smith said “finding a use” for extra carts “has not been a problem.” Already this year, 10,000 of them — above and beyond the 22,000 currently in storage — have been delivered to existing blue-cart households that needed additional carts or had to replace “worn or damaged” ones.
It’s not the first time the Daley administration has found itself with a massive stockpile of garbage carts.
Five years ago, the Sun-Times reported that at least 20,000 damaged black carts were stashed at 103rd Street after City Hall was slow to award a repair contract and the clout-heavy company ultimately hired to do the job could not keep pace.
The $2 million repair contract was awarded to Urban Services of America, a heavy contributor to the now-defunct Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO) at the center of the city hiring scandal.
Last month, Urban Services President Doug Ritter pleaded guilty to charges that he helped rig bids that allowed his company to win the cart repair contract.
Ritter is a close friend of John Sullivan, a former managing deputy commissioner of Streets and San convicted in 2006 of lying to federal agents investigating illegal city hiring.
Chicago United Industries was banned by the city for allegedly acting as an illegal broker, only to be reinstated after filing a lawsuit against the city for taking the action without a hearing. The blue-cart contract was supposed to expire in December, 2008, but was extended for two years without competitive bidding.
[Originally posted by Fran Spielman on July 9th 2010 in The Chicago Sun-Times]
