Recycling? What recycling?

By Phil Taylor
Medill Reports - Chicago

Rows of trash dumpsters as long as city blocks line the alleys behind downtown restaurants, but recycling advocates and some restaurant owners say too much of the waste ends up in landfills.

Environmental advocates have long complained that restaurant owners are flouting laws requiring them to recycle most of their waste, and they blame the city for not enforcing them.

"Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever gone out and performed a recycling audit," said Dan Rosenthal, president of the Rosenthal Group, Inc., and owner of Loop restaurants Sopraffina Marketcaffès, Trattoria No. 10 and Poag Mahone's. "So much for the greenest city in the nation."

Several calls to the Streets and Sanitation Department, which is responsible for conducting random audits of restaurants and private waste haulers, were not returned.

Chicago's recycling ordinance went into effect in 1995 and requires all licensed restaurants to recycle at least three items, or one item as long as it makes up at least 51 percent by weight of the waste load. Food waste is not covered by the ordinance.

Restaurants found to be in violation of the ordinance face fines of $25-$100 a day, but it is unclear whether any fines have ever been imposed.

"It's all sort of a sham," said Rosenthal, who says his restaurants, which recently switched to using biodegradable, corn-based plastic bags, have never been audited. "If you talk to companies, it's not being enforced. It relies on self-enforcement."

Rosenthal estimates more than half of the city's 10,000 or so licensed restaurants, mostly smaller-scale independent establishments, don't recycle at all and are not held accountable. The Boston-based Green Restaurant Association estimates that a restaurant can produce an average of 150,000 pounds of waste per year, said executive director Michael Oshman.

"It takes desire on the part of restaurant owner to get into a recycling program, and what creates desire? Well, fear." Fear, according to Rosenthal, comes from economic incentives.

"If it's cheaper to recycle they'll do it. Or, if they could be fined or imprisoned or both," he said.

"You have to understand the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law," said Mike McNamee, director of recycling collection at the Chicago-based Resource Center, a non-profit recycling pick-up service that offers the area's only organic composting service.

McNamee said waste haulers share the blame for the city's restaurant recycling problems because many of them dump into landfills the items they promise to recycle.

"The question is how many (restaurant owners) think they are recycling," McNamee said. "The waste hauler has to say they recycle, but in fact waste haulers are not recycling."

Some private hauling services in Chicago say they recycle blue bags left in their dumpsters the same way city-contracted Allied Waste separates blue bags from residential waste, but skeptics say there are no ways of verifying this system always operates.

The recycling ordinance requires the city to conduct periodic audits of hauling companies contracted by restaurants to verify what percentage of each client's waste is recycled.

For their part, hauling companies must submit semi-annual reports detailing whose waste they pick up and how much of it is recycled, as well as the percentage of clients that have no contracts for recycling. Veolia Environmental Services in Melrose Park said it serves some Chicago restaurants that do not have recycling contracts.

If city officials give the wink to waste haulers and restaurant owners, it's because their own blue bag program has been proven ineffective, said Betsy Vandercook, board member for the Chicago Recycling Coalition and chief-of-staff for Alderman Joe Moore (49th).

"They (city officials) go out and check some buildings, but is it a high priority? No," Vandercook said. "What's really undercut the whole program is the blue bag."

The coalition has long advocated for an expansion of the city's blue cart program, a source-separated recycling system started in 2006, and currently used in seven city wards, including the 19th Ward, which was one of the first in the city to use the program.

"It's going to be a long and slow process," Vandercook said, citing the high cost of blue carts the city must purchase. It's a stumbling block the city must pass before restaurant recycling will be enforced. "Once it gets to a critical mass they'll have more of a stomach to go after the commercial buildings."