CULTURE
Cans in The Alley
The garbage men come on Thursdays. The homeless come every day in between.
They live at the end of the alley behind the Amoco/BP station. They gather there during the day, their shopping carts pulled to the sides like parapets around their own special fort, living a life only the homeless can understand.
By nightfall they are gone. The lucky ones are back in the shelters, three of them so far in Bucktown, with 900 beds that can be rented for $18 a night. Others you can find sleeping under the Kennedy Expressway beside the Western Avenue viaduct in a sliver of land the city wants to turn into a skateboard park next year.
That’s where I found William, a refugee on the streets for the last two years. Two years ago, William was a counselor at the St. Leonard’s Rehabilitation Center. Today he is his own man, something of an entrepreneur known as one of the better alley scroungers in the neighborhood.
When I encountered William, he was standing under the viaduct sharing a pint of whiskey and a cigarette with a friend. He stood at the helm of a shopping cart loaded on both sides with trash bags filled with aluminum cans. His prize find – a large metal drum – took up most of the shopping cart proper, and then some.
William was headed seven blocks north to the Bucktown Recycling Center, 3041 N. Rockwell, where he will sell his cans for 42 cents a pound unless, of course, they are too contaminated with other garbage.
On a good day, William can make two runs to the recycling center. If he has ten bags of cans on each run -- less weight than the average shopper takes to the car from the grocery store -- he can get $30 - $40 for each delivery. Add in that heavy metal drum, and he might be looking at a $100 day.
For as long as she's been in Chicago, my wife has been separating out our empty aluminum cans into a plastic bag and hanging them out in the alley for William and the other shopping cart skippers. She is careful to do it on any day other than garbage pick-up day so the city workers don't toss it in with the regular trash. And never in seven years have I seen a bag hang on our fence for more than two hours.
We do not generate a hugh number of empty cans -- maybe only two or three pounds a week -- but even then, my wife's habit is like taping a dollar bill to the garage door. “Yeah, lots of people do that,” William said. “It makes things a lot easier.”
At first, I thought my wife was carrying on some hobo tradition she learned from her grandmother in Rockford. Like the pie in the window sill, the cans on the alley post were some kind of sign that good-hearted people lived here. One day, I even returned home to find one of the alley scroungers sweeping up the scattered contents of a blue bag around our garbage cans. “Can you believe it,” he said. “Some people just want to mess it up for everyone.”
But my wife’s practice of hanging cans in the alley, she tells me, arose more out of her concern with the city blue bag recycling program than any historical memories. And the more I looked into the program, the more I began to believe she has discovered a far better alternative.
Chicago’s Blue Bag recycling program was started in the late 90’s when America’s cities went on a rampage of urban recycling. According to the National Soft Drink Association, municipal recycling programs were suddenly serving 140 million people -- three times the number served in 1990.
Traditional programs require citizens to put cans, bottles and paper into separate containers apart from other waste; these containers are then separately collected and dispatched to approved recycling centers. The process not only puts a heavy burden on citizens to separate at the kitchen door, but also increases the labor costs (and trucks) needed to handle the pick-up.
Blue Bag recycling was a Mayor Daley special, another one of those “thinking out of the box” solutions that he would become famous for. Instead of doubling the number of collections, Chicago would ask citizens to put cans, bottles and paper into special plastic blue bags, then toss them into regular cans with the other garbage. At the garbage dumping sub-stations, high tech machinery and a squad of hand-pickers would then pick out the recyclables for separate processing right on site.
The system had inherent inefficiencies and slippage. But, in theory, what was lost in efficiency would be made up for by consumer easy-of-use and the sheer volume of waste materials subjected to the recycling process.
In its first year, the city claimed 34% of the citizens participated. By 2001, that number had slipped to 28 percent. Last January, The Chicago Tribune uncovered a city study showing the rate had slipped to just 13.3% in 2003. Not one of the 50 city wards had more than a 30% participation rate and some – like the 37th, 20th and 22nd wards – had fewer than 2% of the citizens recycling.
Tribune reporters went with city officials to a South Side waste station to observe the recycling system in action. “Chicago Tribune reporters saw a front-end loader flatten 10-foot-high mounds of garbage at the facility on 110th Street,” the paper reported. “Two workers waded into the pile to pick out blue bags. Virtually none of the few blue bags that dotted the garbage pile were intact.
"The shredded bags were then put into a truck apart from other garbage. As workers carried the bags, recyclables spilled out. One bag yielded a cascade of green bottles, which clanked against the floor and stayed in the mound with the rest of the garbage destined for landfills,” the report continued. “Shreds of a blue plastic bag were twisted around the arm of the front-end loader, flapping as it moved the garbage around. The loader bucker lifted waste that appeared to include filled blue bags into a dumpster bound for a landfill.”
Skepticism about the city’s blue bag recycling effort grows. In the city’s 19th ward in Beverly, the alderman has convinced the city to undertake a pilot program adopting the suburban-style system for separate pickups of garbage and recyclables. In many north side grocery stores, blue bags for recycling are not even sold. In stores where they are, the cost is almost double that of regular trash bags.
To counteract the bad publicity, the Mayor has awarded a $740,000 contact to MK Communications to boost program participation.
But maybe William and his cohorts behind the shopping carts are showing us a better way, a uniquely American way otherwise known as the private enterprise system.
Aluminum is the most profitable material to recycle, and the most environmentally worthwhile to recycle because of the latent energy savings in not having to manufacture new aluminum from scratch.
“If ever there was a commodity that begged for recycling, it’s aluminum,” says Allen Hershkowitz, a recycling expert for the National Resources Defense Council. Because it takes so much electricity to make aluminum, the latent energy savings along in the 760,000 tons of aluminum trashed last year could light up Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, San Francisco and Seattle for a year.
The alley scroungers who pick up our cans in the alley do us a double favor: first by transporting them free to the recycling center, then again by keeping the cans uncontaminated by the other garbage that too often blends into the blue bag contents.
They receive the highest price for their deliveries because they provide the best quality (at the lowest operating cost. The recycling center will, if you ask, give you a free shopping cart to carry your cans.) The most in-demand recylable material gets back into the marketplace at the least cost, and the people who do it sustain a lifestyle that would otherwise by unsustainable.
There’s something quite wonderful about it all. Sad in its way, but wonderful nonetheless. And so, William, I salute you for your service to the community. . . and recommend that, next time, everyone put your cans in the alley.