For the second year in a row, the Cook County government has celebrated Earth Day by announcing a new south suburban recycling facility aimed at taking some of the nastiest garbage out of the waste stream.
Recycling
Get Ready to Clean Out the Garage. Household Hazardous Waste Collection Site Coming to South Suburbs
Instead of trashing those vital eclipse glasses, recycle them at any one of dozens of Chicago locations.
One bill would require facilities that store electric vehicle batteries to register with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency by 2026. The state’s Pollution Control Board would set the regulations for the proper storage of EV batteries.
Live and natural holiday trees can be dropped off in a tree recycling corral at one of 27 designated locations in the city from Jan. 6-20.
The recent shift toward e-cigarettes that can’t be refilled has created a new environmental dilemma. The devices, which contain nicotine, lithium and other metals, cannot be reused or recycled. Under federal environmental law, they also aren’t supposed to go in the trash.
Less than 9% of the trash produced every year by Chicago residents is kept out of landfills — a rate that has been essentially unchanged for five years, despite repeated calls for the city to do a better job at recycling.
It starts with an assembly line of sorts: washing and drying detergent bottles that have been collected from different laundromats. The plastic is then shredded into small granules, heated and made into a solid beam to create benches.
The failure likely sent hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, wood, brick, metal and glass into landfills that could have been reused or recycled, according to the audit by the city’s watchdog.
A coalition of attorneys general said the Federal Trade Commission needs to strengthen the process for “ensuring consumers are protected from companies providing overinflated or even false claims about their products’ environmental benefits.”
The CHARM Center, as it’s been dubbed, will open Saturday in South Holland. The free, permanent recycling hub will accept items including electronics, textiles and Styrofoam, many of which are reusable.
Live trees — well, not so live anymore — can be recycled at any one of 26 citywide locations, Jan. 7-21.
Six community gardens will test the logistics of a compost program that could be expanded if it proves successful and scaleable.
Chicago has long had a tortured relationship with recycling. City leaders have scrapped old programs and replaced them with new ones, but the result is the same recycling rates in the single digits.
Chicago bills itself as a world-class city, but when it comes to recycling, its performance has been less than first-rate.
Along with accepting items for donation, experts will be on hand to share tips not only about recycling but re-using, re-purposing and reducing consumption.
The monthly Sustainability Market provides a one-stop drop-off point for items that range from crayons to wet suits.