Recycling

Walgreens, Dominick's To Offer Blue Bags To Help Chicago's Recycling:

The city of Chicago has reached an agreement with Dominick’s grocery stores and Walgreens drug stores to pack customers’ purchases in blue bags that the customers can later use to place recyclables in. The city is hoping the move will spur participation in its recycling program, which encourages residents to separate recyclables from their garbage by placing them in blue bags

Of course, this has nothing to do with the report in todays Trib that compliance in the Chicago recycling program is the lowest ever.....

In testimony before a City Council committee, Al Sanchez confirmed that 22 percent of the city's paper, cans, glass and other trash were diverted from landfills to be reused for the one-year period ending June 2003.

It was the blue-bag program's worst performance since 1998. The city met its target residential recycling rate of 25 percent within three years of introducing the blue-bag program in 1995, but the numbers have declined in recent years.

The newest figure represented a one-year drop of 5 percentage points, according to the "State of Recyling Report" released Tuesday at a meeting of the council's Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Recycling.

Sanchez blamed changes in the program's management.

Allied Waste Transportation Inc. replaced Waste Management Inc. as operator of the city's sorting and recycling centers last year. The Department of Streets and Sanitation, meanwhile, took over responsibility for overseeing the blue-bag program from the city's Environment Department about 18 months ago.