Soon after Wilson Ramon Torres moved into a West Rogers Park condo last year, he went looking for the building's recycling-and couldn't find it.
"Recycling obviously is a form of habit, and once I got into it, it was one of those things that I wanted to continue," he said.
But when he asked building managers about the recycling program, they confirmed that it didn't exist, Torres, 40, said.
"They said it really boils down to cost. It will cost more money a month, and the assessments will go up," he said. "And when you put it that way, the assessment is already high as it is. I'll just walk across the street to a residential alley [recycling bin] and pop [mine] in there instead."
And that's just what Torres does. "Every Thursday," he said.
A spokesperson with Owl Management, the management company for Torres' apartment building, confirmed that the building does not have a recycling program, but that it would be the responsibility of the condo association to put one in place.
Torres is one of many Chicagoans who live in multi-unit buildings where the city does not collect recycling. Unlike single family homes, two-flats and some three-flats, which are issued blue recycling carts by the Department of Streets and Sanitation, larger apartment buildings are required by city law to provide their own recycling program to residents.
But because the law isn't strictly enforced, some residents have to be proactive to find out what recycling options are available to them, dispose of their recyclables themselves or forgo recycling entirely. The dilemma comes especially into focus around September, when many Chicagoans are moving into new apartments, without a clear answer to the question of whether their buildings recycle.
In 1993, the City Council passed an ordinance that requires multi-unit residential buildings to contract with waste management companies to provide recycling in their buildings and present residents with a recycling plan when they move in. The deadline to comply was in 1996.
But, nearly a decade later, the city does not formally monitor whether residential buildings are complying with the ordinance, according to Molly Poppe, a spokeswoman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, and does not issue citations to buildings that simply don't recycle.
"We're not fining high-density residential buildings," she said. "The city's goal is really to encourage recycling participation through conversations with residents, building managers and owners of buildings, so we're not looking to do penalties or punishments."
Poppe said it is likely that some residents are unaware that their buildings offer recycling because some building managers or landlords do not do a thorough job explaining the recycling options to tenants.
She said the department sends ward superintendents to speak with local building managers and encourage them to educate tenants about recycling.
"I live in a high-density building, and I didn't know anything about [our recycling] until I asked management and they pointed it out to me," she said.
For the past several years, the focus of the city's recycling program has been on establishing and expanding its blue cart service to every eligible home, according to Chris Sauve, the department's recycling director. Founded in 2007 but slow to get off the ground, the city's blue cart program only began reaching every ward in 2013.
The blue carts are available to more than 600,000 city homes, he said, and the city expects to collect more than 120,000 tons of recycling this year.
Sauve said it is likely that many Chicago high-rises recycle, but appear not to because all of their trash-including recyclables-is collected at the bottom of a single chute and sorted later by a waste management company. Though that method of collecting recyclables is not the department's preference, he said, it is the only option for some buildings with older infrastructure and no space to store recycling. Sauve said he does not know how many residential buildings recycle that way because the department does not keep detailed track of that information.
"For us, the focus was to get the blue cart program rolled out, and see that collections are going well," Sauve said.
Some environmental advocates say the city's recycling efforts are falling short, in part because the ordinance lacks teeth.
"Recycling works better now, in terms of individual homes and buildings with four units or fewer, but when it comes to high-rises, it's still kind of a crapshoot," said Mike Nowak, the president of the nonprofit Chicago Recycling Coalition, which advocates for better municipal recycling practices. "There's no enforcement. That shows how ineffective [the city's policy] is and why it needs to be updated."
Casey Wood, 21, of Wicker Park, sends her cans and bottles off to her roommate's workplace to be recycled because she is unaware of a recycling program in their apartment building.
After living in New York City, where she noticed recycling receptacles were widely available, Wood said she's been surprised by how non-intuitive recycling opportunities are in Chicago.
"You just assume that you move into an apartment and they're going to recycle," she said. "It's just a common thing now, or it should be. So when you realize that they don't, it's kind of bizarre."
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