Bins work better than bags anyway.
An excerpt.
City to wave white flag on blue bags
By Dan Mihalopoulos and Gary WashburnTribune staff reporters
October 24, 2006, 11:11 PM CDT
After defending his faltering recycling program for years, Mayor Richard Daley on Tuesday said he plans to bag blue bags, signaling the death of an initiative that most Chicagoans ignored.
A pilot program featuring blue garbage carts for recyclables will "eventually" be expanded citywide, the mayor said.
As a result of the change, Daley said, the city "will save an enormous amount of money" by increasing the amount of recyclable trash that is kept out of landfills.
The blue bag program has been in a slow and tortuous demise, even as City Hall insisted that it was working well and that it was too expensive to replace it.
In a meeting earlier this month with the Tribune's editorial board, Daley said it would not make financial sense to run trucks that pick up paper, glass and cans in areas where residents don't recycle. "We always will have a blue bag," he said then.
But on Saturday, senior Daley aides announced that suburban-style, curbside recycling bins would be distributed to homes in seven wards next year on an experimental basis. Although the Daley aides expressed hope for a citywide curbside cart program, they were less definite on the subject than Daley was on Tuesday.
