City doesn’t enforce law requiring commercial landlords to recycle: report

Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel vowed a crackdown on scofflaws, only three fines totaling $750 have been levied

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images and iStock)
Mayor Rahm Emanuel (Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images and iStock)

Commercial property owners in Chicago are required by law to provide recycling services, but a new report shows the city makes virtually no effort to enforce the rules.

Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel vowed a crackdown on scofflaws, only three fines totaling $750 have been levied and less than 500 of the nearly 77,000 buildings covered by the law have been inspected, according to a Better Government Association [BGA] report published in Block Club Chicago.

The report follows previous BGA studies showing that Chicago’s residential recycling rate is the lowest of any major city, that the city allows private haulers to take recyclables to landfills and that enforcement has plunged. The allegations stand in contrast to a 2018 study conducted by CBRE Group Inc. and Maastricht University, which called Chicago the most environmentally friendly U.S. city to work in for two years running.

After Emanuel took office in 2012, the city launched the Blue Cart program, which provides for curbside pickup of recycling in single-family homes and smaller multi-unit residential buildings.

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The 2017 changes required all buildings with five or more units to provide sufficient private recycling services and increased the daily fines for violators to between $500 and $5,000.

But they also no longer mandated that property owners certify their buildings have recycling, as many other cities require.

A spokesperson for Emanuel said the city’s priority is to work with landlords and not against them, and that the inspections have proven successful at winning compliance.

[Block Club]John O’Brien