North Cook News

State Rep. Tom Morrison (R-Palatine) recently visited the Groot Recycling and Waste Facility in Elk Grove Village to discuss how recycling efforts in his district can be improved. 

According to a Better Government Association (BGA) report, less than 9% of all Chicago's residential waste is recycled. That's the worst rate in the nation, and is contributed to by private waste haulers labeling bins as contaminated so they're sent to the landfill for a profit to the private hauler and an expense to the Illinois taxpayer. 

Morrison said that constituents occasionally mention the issue of recycling to him and that related legislation often surfaces in Springfield. In a conversation with Groot's Jordan Berkeley, Morrison discussed how materials being brought to the recycling center have been low-quality and often contaminated. 

Those items are donated through 'wish recycling,' a term describing material that the consumer thinks or wants to be recyclable – such as a cardboard pizza box – but isn't. 

With the grease, cheese and other food residue in the box, though, it's not a usable product for recycling. 

Berkeley explained that a certain level of cleanliness is required in the products for the mills to process them. Wet cardboard is another problem. 

"It affects [the mill's] pulping process," Berkeley said. "They need the driest material they can possibly get."

BGA found that over half a million recycling bins were taken to the landfill since 2014 because of contamination in Chicago alone—enough bins to fill Wrigley Field from the field to over the manual scoreboard. 

BGA reached out to a private waste collector, Waste Management, which denied the notion that there was a financial motivation in taking that much recycling to the landfill. 

“The overall premise of your story that we are purposely trying to divert materials to landfills is not true,” Waste Management told BGA, noting that the city is the one to decide where contaminated bins are dumped. “Recycling contamination is an undeniable trend across the country. It is no different here in Chicago.”

Priority recyclable items

Newspaper/Junk mail/Mixed paper

Glossy magazines

Cardboard and paperboard

Plastic soda/water/drink bottles

Other plastic product bottles

Aluminum/tin/metal cans

Items should be dry and clean of food and product debris to be recycled. 

"Recycling is not dead," Morrison said. "It has a long life ahead that we need to stop and re-look at how we are doing things and what we really want recycling to be. We're tackling that as a society right now. What do we want it to be in this country?"