A lone Amazon box teetered on top of a pyramid of trash bags stuffed into a residential dumpster in the West Loop.

“There you got your people that don’t recycle,” said Orando “OG” George, a driver for the city’s largest waste management provider, as he pushed the dumpster toward his truck on a recent weekday morning.

If recyclable materials are put in trash bins, George said, he has no choice but to dispose of them with the rest of the garbage.

Like many other recyclables in Chicago, that cardboard box was destined for a landfill.

The numbers are stark: According to city of Chicago calculations, only 9.6% of the city’s waste was recycled in 2022. This rate indicates the percentage of waste kept out of landfills and incinerators.

The majority of other large U.S. cities have not released their most recent rates, but Minneapolis reported it recycled 19% of its waste last year. In past years, several West Coast cities have reported recycling rates above 70%, with San Francisco leading the way with more than 80% recycled since 2008, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Even New York City recycled about 20% in 2020, The New York Times reported.

[ Chicago’s recycling rate remains stubbornly low, even as the pandemic increased the amount of household waste ]

Now recycler LRS is aiming to help Chicago improve its diversion rate with a $50 million state-of-the-art facility. Officially opened in the New City neighborhood last month, the facility, known as The Exchange, separates materials based on chemical and physical properties, including shape, size, weight, magnetism and more.

It was designed to process 25 tons of recyclables per hour — and eventually, 35 tons per hour — and divert 112,000 tons of recyclables per year from regional landfills. Under Chicago’s 2022 recycling rate, 84,757 tons of waste was diverted from landfills.

While an increase in processing speed should improve the city’s dismal recycling rate, other stumbling blocks remain.

Educating residents about the difference between nonrecyclables and recyclables still presents a challenge — as does motivating them to participate. Historically, Chicagoans haven’t trusted the city’s recycling program.

[ City scraps troubled Blue Bag program ]

During a recent open house hosted by the Argonne National Laboratory, scientist Max Delferro said he was discouraged to see that most people who showed up at the plastics recycling booth knew little about what to put in recycling bins.

“The problem of the blue bin in the alley is that I can do perfect recycling,” said Delferro, who specializes on the chemical recycling of plastics. “But my neighbor that maybe doesn’t know — maybe because there was no education on how to do that — put a plastic bag in my blue bin and now my perfectly recyclable material became contaminated.”

Experts say industry must also take responsibility and contribute to reducing the toll of waste on the planet.

“Paper is made from trees, metal is mined, plastic comes from oil, and glass is made from sand. And these things are logged, mined, drilled and extracted from our planet,” said LRS Sustainability Manager Joy Rifkin.

“Waste maybe isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when we think of climate change, but it’s so interconnected,” Rifkin said. “Think about all the materials we use, all the industry involved, all the factories making these products that ultimately end up being recycled or thrown into the landfill.”

Stephanie Katsaros is the president of the Chicago Sustainability Task Force, a multiagency organization that helps raise environmental awareness in Chicago. She is also the founder of Bright Beat, a consulting firm that advances environmental and social responsibility.

She said the No. 1 question she gets as a sustainability advocate is whether materials were actually recycled under the city’s controversial Blue Bag program run from 1995 to 2008. Under the system, bags of recyclables were mixed with regular garbage.

A 2005 Tribune investigation found that recycling rates under the program were far lower than the city had reported, that much of the recycled material was improperly being shipped to an Indiana farm and that contracts for the program were going to allies of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley.

[ City cooks Blue Bag books ]

“Ever since the old days of ‘Throw your blue bag in the garbage and, trust me, it’ll be recycled,’ Chicagoans don’t trust that recycling really happened,” Katsaros said. “So we need to build trust back from the ground up.”

City officials hope the current Blue Cart system, launched in 2008, can yield increasingly better results.

“Certainly there’s been skepticism over the years with recycling in general, and a lot of skepticism and complaints about our own program, probably because of the old Blue Bag system that existed,” said Chris Sauve, deputy commissioner for recycling at the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation. “We’re far from what that old program was. The system that we have now is a system that is extremely convenient and fairly simple for people to utilize.”

But it is a system that still gives residents problems.

Single-stream recycling, where all recyclables are placed into the same bin like Chicago’s system, has made recycling easier for consumers, but results in about one-quarter of the materials nationally being contaminated, according to the EPA. Recyclables are contaminated when they are soiled by food or liquids, when they are mixed in with other trash or when they are placed in plastic bags.

Public confusion — and subsequent contamination — can stem from something as simple as a small symbol on plastic packaging, for example. Some people may believe all plastic is the same, but there are seven types of plastic with different uses and chemical properties: No. 1 or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), No. 2 or high-density polyethylene (HDPE), No 3. or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), No. 4 or low-density polyethylene, No. 5 or polypropylene (PP), No. 6 or polystyrene, and No. 7 which includes polycarbonate and polymethyl methacrylate.

All plastics have these numbers on their surface, surrounded by three curved arrows in a triangular shape — it looks like the recycling symbol — but it does not mean the items are recyclable. Plastic bags and films are made of low-density polyethylene, for instance, and are not recyclable.

Only plastic products like single-use bottles made with PET and detergent and shampoo containers made with HDPE are recyclable, as well as some PP plastics like food containers, according to Delferro.

Incentives and deterrents to encourage citizens to pay attention to what is or isn’t recyclable have long been part of the discussion. In Delferro’s home country of Italy, the Argonne scientist said, household members separate the materials into a bin for plastic, a bin for glass, a bin for paper — and they get fined if it is done incorrectly.

John Sliwicki, executive vice president of LRS, said he believes penalties might be counterproductive.

“There’s a balance between education and targeting people because it’s the right thing to do,” Sliwicki said. “Then, at what point do you start making it punitive? So we try to incentivize people to recycle and make it easy for them to recycle.”

In the past, aldermen have proposed changing the monthly $9.50 garbage collection fee for Chicago households with four dwelling units or less to a volume-based fee that would incentivize recycling. But the city has no penalties or rewards in place.

“We want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to recycle in the city. So if you’re using the city’s Blue Cart program, there’s no penalty for whether it’s contaminated or whether you’re not participating at a 100% level,” Sauve said. “I do think that penalizing is probably the last step that any municipality wants to take because it’s really going to discourage people from participating. Building better incentives would certainly be wonderful.”

Chicago’s household waste diversion rates decreased from 10.4% to 8.6% between 2015 and 2021.

In 2021, the city and the Delta Institute, a Chicago nonprofit that tackles environmental and economic challenges in communities across the Midwest, released a new waste strategy plan. That same year, the city signed a three-year contract with LRS to collect blue recycling carts in four of the city’s six service regions.

As of July, the city reported a waste diversion rate averaging 10% in 2023.

“I think it’s definitely something we want to improve,” Sauve said. “We’ve talked about improving that diversion number for the last few years and it was seismic change that we saw after that waste study was released.”

Reducing organic waste is also a topic of ongoing conversations. The city recently introduced a pilot program where residents can drop off certain organic waste materials at community gardens.

“We do not have a robust organic collections system,” Sauve said. “A lot of municipalities have switched toward this three cart type system — black cart, a blue cart and a green cart or brown cart — to capture organic material. I know for us, organics is the next step in terms of improving that number.”

For now, the Department of Streets and Sanitation crews empty the blue carts along their routes and take the recyclable material to a service yard called a transfer station. Recyclable materials are consolidated into larger vehicles and transported to one of three LRS material recovery facilities in Forest View, Northbrook or The Exchange on the South Side to be processed.

As she walked around The Exchange before lunchtime one day, Rifkin, the LRS manager, pointed out how a spiral screen had just launched a shoe into the air. The rotating tool with helixes separates materials by size and removes unwanted trash.

“We can’t control what people put in the bins,” said Rifkin with a shrug. “I mean, we can do better education.”

Though the new material recovery facility officially opened Aug. 9, operations started in February and have been scaled up gradually. Since March, 90% of Chicago’s Blue Cart materials have been processed at The Exchange, which LRS representatives say can recycle 10 more tons per hour than the center in Forest View.

“The Exchange is already focused on innovation. Everything that’s in the facility is state of the art,” said the new CEO of LRS Matt Spencer. “I anticipate two years from now, we’ll double the volume going through the facility.”

Of the facility’s six optical sorters, three separate fibers and three are dedicated to picking out recyclable products made of No. 1, No. 2 and No. 5 plastic. As a camera discerns between materials on a high-speed conveyor, puffs of air shoot certain plastics up into a different receptacle.

Glass needs to be broken to be recycled, which an aptly named glass breaker does at The Exchange. Then a cyclone separator, which looks like a storage structure or silo, swirls the materials around using centrifugal air. This makes heavy glass fall down and pieces of fiber and plastics get sucked up into a vacuumlike structure.

A paper screen separates flat material like paper and small pieces of fiber from material like containers like jugs, tubs, jars and bottles.

Other machinery uses properties such as magnetism to sort through material. Cans and tins stick to a drum magnet, a rolling cylinder that attracts metals containing iron and transports them to a separate conveyor belt. Another conveyor belt works as a reverse magnetic field, repelling metals like aluminum.

Despite advancements in sorting technologies, Rifkin said, staff members still play an important role in increasing diversion rates. Decked out with gloves, safety helmets and goggles, employees stood watch over multiple conveyor belts, occasionally picking out trash that had sneaked past the technological sorters.

After undergoing one final inspection by quality control teams, plastics, aluminum and paper are compacted into separate bales. Thousands of flattened cans of beer, sparkling water and soda form colorful parcels no bigger than a kid’s playpen.

Other bales are made up of thousands of sheets of paper and newspaper pages, or of countless plastic containers. They all wait in the warehouse for their turn to be shipped to different processing facilities across the country and be given a new purpose.

Even though Chicagoans put all their recyclables in a single bin, they can ultimately be given a new life in one of nine states: A paper cup, for example, can end up in a nearby mill in the Midwest, while a water bottle can end up in the Deep South. The city and LRS now provide residents with an online storytelling tool available at chicagorecycles.org to discover how close or far their recyclables travel.

“Our goal is to increase transparency around this. We don’t want this to be secretive,” Rifkin said. “We don’t want people to think that it’s not happening. In order to increase diversion rates, we want to get the message out there that this is imperfect — we can’t recycle everything.”

After being sorted, glass is sent to mills in Illinois and Wisconsin, and metal is sent to Illinois and Kentucky. Paper materials could land in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan or Wisconsin. But cartons are sent only to Wisconsin. Mills in Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and as far south as Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina process plastics.

LRS became the city’s exclusive recycling collector in June 2021. Since then, the company reported in early September it has recycled the following from the Blue Cart program:

• 26,850 tons of glass, used to make new glass containers, fiberglass and road base
• 4,029 tons of metal, used to make metal containers and other products
• 52,525 tons of paper and cardboard, used to make other paper products and corrugated cardboard
• 202 tons of cartons, used to make new liquid containers
• 5,753 tons of plastic, used to make new plastic containers, clothing and backpacks

Katsaros of the Sustainability Task Force said she is happy that Chicagoans can now find out that the paper cup they once drank coffee from was sent to a mill in Wisconsin to be recycled.

“That beautiful transparency did not exist 15 years ago,” she said.

Sliwicki’s 6-year-old daughter loves Barbie dolls. Every time she gets a new one and opens the cardboard box, he can’t help but notice the many different materials inside such as wire twist-ties, plastic blister packs and display windows.

“My daughter would buy a Barbie on a paper bag just sitting on the shelf,” Sliwicki said. “She doesn’t need all of the packaging.”

He said producers could help by making packaging less wasteful and making it easier to identify what is recyclable. Recycling infrastructure is necessary, he said, but focusing on packaging is better in the long run. It comes down to cutting the problem at the root.

“You’re creating this packaging — you don’t get to just sell it and never think about it again,” Rifkin said. “You need to have some responsibility of what happens, to the end.”

With so many government and corporate parties not being held accountable, Katsaros said she feels conflicted about guilting individuals who might be confused, unable or even unwilling to recycle.

“Is it fair for us to point a finger at the single mom living on the West Side who doesn’t have a blue bin because someone stole it?” she asked. “Are we pointing our finger at her and creating messaging to make her feel guilty about her recycling or food waste? Or should we be pointing our finger at the grocery chain that is at the end of her block that is not even recycling their own cardboard?”

While he is “all for incentivizing and looking at different ways to push and nudge residents,” Sauve said it would be a “game changer” at the municipal level if single-use packaging companies started taking financial responsibility.

“We’re the ones that are having to deal with the waste and the recyclables and figuring out where this material needs to go and trying to do the best we can to divert from landfills,” he said. “But that’s kind of the end of the line. The beginning of the line is how much of this material is coming into the city or state into people’s kitchens and homes — who really should be footing the bill for that?”

Once enacted, a new law in Illinois will make producers of packaging and paper products pay annual membership dues for the waste they produce and fund local and state recycling programs.

Sauve said it would “completely flip the narrative” and allow the city to invest in new diversion systems.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Packaging and Paper Stewardship bill into law in July. Full implementation will likely happen by summer 2026, but the first step is to conduct a statewide assessment to identify current recycling management practices and potential improvements.

In countries in South America and Europe, beverage and grocery industries buy back single-use glass bottles from consumers.

“In my dream world,” Rifkin said, “we would treat glass like the precious commodity that it is.”

In the meantime, she wonders how to recapture the materials humans overproduce and mindlessly discard.

“Something’s only waste when we don’t have something to do with it,” she said.

Electricity company SaveOnEnergy published an interactive map in 2016 that showed the proliferation of landfills across the United States throughout the 20th century. Before the middle of the century, few landfills dotted the map.

Less trash was likely being produced in those first few decades, but solid waste was also mostly unregulated as people threw garbage in waterways or burned it — until the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, when the federal government started managing trash, and more landfills started popping up.

“They’re very regulated,” Rifkin said of landfills. “But this map truly shows me that we cannot continue with business as usual. We’re gonna run out of space. And we have to think of waste as an asset and a commodity that we can do something with.”

According to the EPA, the United States generated 292.4 million tons of solid waste in 2018. That trash will stay in landfills for years, decades and even centuries, as methane-producing bacteria decomposes it — producing approximately 15% of methane emissions in the United States. Methane, a major contributor to global warming, can be up to 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“Recycling is definitely not the solution to the climate crisis, it’s not the solution to all of our environmental issues,” Rifkin said. “But it’s a piece of that puzzle. And I think that it is super important to recognize that it is protecting natural resources for future generations, it is happening and we all should be talking about it.”

adperez@chicagotribune.com