Only three years ago, it was about as hard to find a recycling program in the suburbs as it was to find somebody who walked to the grocery.
Now, to count suburban recycling programs is akin to counting the blades of grass in a lawn. At least 105 communities-approaching half of the metropolitan area`s suburbs-have a service to collect recyclables, and many more have plans to start such a service soon.
The programs follow a basic pattern, but, just as Evanston is different from Calumet City, no two recycling systems are exactly alike. Some are bare- bones; some are as elaborate as Irish lace.
In a quest for the best, Tribune reporters surveyed the suburbs to find out what the area`s recycling programs collect, how well residents use the services, how much the services cost and how the services are publicized.
Based on that information, the standout towns in recycling are Arlington Heights, Cary, Crete, Homewood, Naperville and Oak Park, mainly because they collect more items than other programs and enjoy unusually high support from their residents.
Honorable mentions go to Lansing, Oak Lawn, St. Charles, and La Grange Park for their educational efforts, good participation rates, or the unusual features of their programs.
Although recycling programs are distributed across the metropolitan area, not all regions are as firmly on board the recycling bandwagon as others. In west suburban Cook County, for instance, 14 of the 36 suburbs have a curbside program, but 10 suburbs do not even have a dropoff site where residents can bring their recyclables.
South Cook County suburbs have also been slow to start programs, a perhaps not surprising state of affairs given the economic woes of many of those towns. That could also help explain why the older outlying industrial towns of Waukegan, Joliet, and Aurora have no collection programs, although Joliet has a pilot project and Aurora is gearing up a program.
It`s more surprising to find that neither Lake Forest nor Glen Ellyn, two of the more affluent suburbs, have a curbside program. Both, however, plan to hit the streets with programs soon. Lake Forest decided to concentrate on yard waste first, according to Tom Cahill, assistant to the village manager, because of the bosky community`s heavy production of green garbage.
And Glen Ellyn relied on the village`s 20-year-old dropoff center until its old-and reasonable-garbage-hauling contract came up for renewal, according to village officials. Glen Ellyn`s curbside program will begin in July.
Existing contracts seem to be the main reason more suburbs have not started curbside programs, but not in Elmhurst, where recycler James Hackett pulled out in the spring, saying city officials did not support him. Officials responded that Hackett made unreasonable demands. Four aldermen recently asked the city to hire a new contractor.
Once a town gets a program running, people seem eager to support it. Curbside collection programs routinely report that 75 percent of the households in their areas participate. It`s not uncommon to see even higher participation rates-Arlington Heights and Homewood, for instance, claim that 95 percent of the households in their communities recycle.
The bare-bones programs collect newsprint, glass bottles and metal cans, but it is increasingly common to find plastic bottles on the pick-up list too. One of the first programs to include plastics was in Arlington Heights, which provides 18,500 households with weekly pickups. These days, the program has expanded beyond milk jugs and pop bottles to include all sorts of plastic containers made from either high-density polyethylene (HDPE) or polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
”We just tell our folks, if you look at the bottom of your container and it has a 1 or a 2 on it, we`ll take it,” said health-services director Tom Oas, referring to the plastic industry`s recycling codes for HDPE and PET.
”We`ll take a cottage-cheese container, a potato-salad container, a wide variety of things.”
The Homewood program limits its plastics to milk jugs and pop bottles, but what makes it a standout is its high participation rate, which has held at 90 percent to 95 percent almost from the program`s startup in August 1989.
”I credit it to a grass-roots education effort,” said Ron Gosack, assistant to the village manager. ”There was a lot of one-on-one contact.”
More Top Picks Why Reading Is Hard After A Concussion
Before the service began, the village put together a volunteer residents group to promote recycling and answer questions. The group held some three dozen neighborhood coffees. Also, the National Council of Jewish Women devised an educational program on recycling for Homewood`s elementary schools. It has proven so successful that other south suburban school districts now want to use it.
Volunteers play an even bigger part in the success of Crete`s recycling service. Without them, Crete wouldn`t have a program. One Sunday a month, members of the Crete Lions Club make a circuit of Crete and much of Crete Township to pick up recyclables, including not only the usual items but also corrugated cardboard and chipboard, the stiff paper used in items such as cereal boxes.
Many Lions Clubs started to pick up paper, aluminum foil and scrap iron in 1944 as part of the war effort, according to club President Bob Kraemer. After the war, the Crete Lions kept up the paper collections, and in 1988, the village asked the Lions to expand the service.
The Crete effort has all the rough-and-ready charm of a barn-raising. They don`t use fancy bins or have a fleet of shiny trucks; when they need help, they call up other volunteer groups, such as the Crete Baseball Association.
And, like a barn-raising, at the end of the day, they have something to show for their sweat. The Crete Lions pick up an average of 32.5 tons of recyclables a month.
The Cary program collects an unusually wide array of recyclables, especially for a small service. In addition to aluminum, glass, plastic and newsprint, the city`s hauler picks up cardboard and chipboard and is considering additional items, such as other types of plastic and used motor oil. The service, run by Monarch Disposal Co., will also pick up old appliances, which can be salvaged for their scrap metal.
Coupled with the service are two features that promote recycling, according to Public Works Supt. Gary Stauffer. The McHenry County town requires residents to use special garbage bags made of recycled plastic, available for $1.50 each. The price gives people an incentive to produce less trash and to recycle as much as possible.
Also, the hauler awards a ”recycler of the month” prize for the household that, among other things, has the cleanest loads of recyclables. The program has generated an average of 66 tons of recyclables monthly, resulting in about a 22 percent reduction in the village`s garbage volume.
One of the challenges facing recycling programs everywhere is the difficulty of collecting recyclables from apartment buildings. Oak Park`s answer has been to set up no fewer than 19 sites around the village where people can drop off their recyclables, including plastic containers.
”We`re finding that non-Oak Parkers use them too,” said recycling coordinator Liliana Bradford, who noted that the village pays a fee every time the drop-off boxes are emptied. ”We end up paying for others` poor planning.”
The village`s curbside service does not collect plastic, but it includes
”mixed paper,” a wide-ranging category that embraces chipboard, magazines and junk mail. Bradford hopes to add plastic to the collection program in the fall when the current contract with Hyde Park`s Resource Center expires.
All of these programs have their strong points, but the town that comes closest to Recycling Utopia is Naperville.
Naperville`s program is the oldest and now the biggest in the metropolitan area: its contractor, Resource Management Naperville, serves 25,000 households and collects an average of 66 tons of recyclables a day. That works out to an impressive 77 pounds of recyclables per household every month.
But the clincher is the long list of items that the recycler accepts. In addition to newsprint, cans and glass and plastic bottles, Resource Management takes aluminum foil, polystyrene, plastic rings from six- and twelve-packs, and all mixed paper, including magazines, computer printouts, bond paper, chipboard, cardboard and junk mail. The hauler also will pick up appliances by special arrangement. And all of the Amoco stations in town accept used motor oil.
The Naperville Area Recycling Center serves as the area`s dropoff center. Next in line, according to resource recovery manager Kris Kaar, is a monthly curbside collection of old clothing and other items for charity. That feature, to be provided by Goodwill Industries, will begin in September.
Kaar`s latest figures show that Naperville is recycling 23.3 percent of its waste, but that rises to 49.3 percent if the city`s yard-waste collections are included.