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Environment

Intro to Chicago's Environment

As much as Chicagoans may like the idea that their city and mayor provides a green example to the world, they are most immediately concerned with the efforts of their elected officials to enhance the quality of their own daily lives and protect them from harm – ecological and otherwise. While earning him an international reputation as a green leader, Mayor Daley's "environmentally friendly way of managing government" (as he put it in his Climate Action Plan introduction) has brought about significant changes in Chicago's ecological life. more

Recycling

Through the expansion of the popular Blue Cart program, the city hoped to overcome its chronic failure to install an efficient recycling program. But will it have the budget to deliver on its promise to reach all neighborhoods by 2011?

Multi-unit residential apartment and condominium buildings, which are not eligible for the Blue Cart program but produce far more garbage, were left to develop recycling programs of their own. An EPA-funded study led to measures to help residents devise such programs. However, the 1993 Burke-Hansen ordinance, which requires at least modest recycling services to be provided in these buildings, has not been regularly enforced. more

Clean Air and Water

The air in Chicago, ranked among the worst in the country, continues to pose health hazard to residents. In the communities of Little Village and Pilsen, the Crawford and Fisk coal-powered plants are permitted to operate without emissions controls until at least 2015, per state legislation. Residents who are at risk for disease or death as a result of the poisonous gases can not afford to wait that long.

In spite of a recommendation by the Illinois EPA, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District does not disinfect sewage at its city plants. The foul water affects the increasing number of individuals who use the Chicago River for recreation as well as eco-systems as far away as the Gulf of Mexico, where the nitrogen and phosphorus from Chicago’s watershed has created an 8,000-square-mile “dead zone.” more

Green Innovation

The rooftop gardens on top of City Hall and the wind turbines on the roof of the Daley Center symbolize Chicago’s commitment to innovative green development. Chicago boasts the most LEED-certified buildings and will be home the nation’s largest urban-based solar plant if a proposed Excelon project in the West Pullman Industrial Redevelopment Area goes through. Mayor Daley made strides in reducing the city’s energy use and, perhaps just as importantly, is getting residents to reduce theirs.

For all the strides the city as made as a green city, it needs to establish a formal standard of what is and isn’t a “green business.” Without such a standard, determining which technologies are “clean” enough to qualify for public funds and incentives like tax breaks can be based on favoritism or guess work. more

Chicago Climate Action Plan

One hundred years after Daniel Burnham’s visionary Plan of Chicago called for the creation of a City Beautiful, Mayor Daley announced his own ambitious plan for the creation of a model environmental town. He provided no specifics as to how the city was going to pay for such dramatic reductions in energy use, waste and industrial pollution, and improvements in public transportation. But at a time when the federal government had abdicated responsibility for reducing greenhouse gases, Daley’s cohesive ecological agenda was a significant achievement.