It’s over, guys.

Stick a 91 percent recycled material fork in it already.

This from the Chi Tribune...

City urged to dump the blue bags
By Dan Mihalopoulos and Laurie Cohen
Tribune staff reporters

December 20, 2005

Encouraged by the success of a pilot recycling initiative on Chicago's Southwest Side, a North Side alderman said he will introduce a proposal ordering Mayor Richard Daley's administration to phase in a similar approach across the city.

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) is expected to call for ending the mayor's controversial blue-bag recycling program within three years at a Tuesday news conference in City Hall with environmentalists.

The blue-bag program began 10 years ago and seems likely to endure as long as Daley maintains his staunch support of it. But only a small fraction of homes participate, and the effort continues to fall far short of its stated goal of diverting 25 percent of the city's residential garbage from landfills.

…
City officials responded that Moore should show them how to come up with the money to replace the blue-bag program.

"We have no revenue source to pay for separate collection in the 2006 budget," Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Michael Picardi said in a statement Monday. "While we can't predict the exact cost, it would be a significant cost."

The city recently extended Allied Waste Transportation's deal to run the blue-bag program for another two years. Allied and its blue-bag subcontractors are important campaign donors to the pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization, which federal prosecutors recently described as part of an illegal patronage-hiring scheme at City Hall.

Under Allied, the city's recycling rate has fallen to about 8 percent.

The recycling program here is a joke.

Materials you bag up properly actually do go to a facility and actually are sorted, but the actual, numerical results are not only trivial, they’re genuinely counterproductive.

From “green” buildings to rooftop gardens to more bike paths than any city its size, Chicago generally -- and City Hall specifically -- has worked very hard to cultivate its image as an environmentally forward-looking metropolis. And the Blue Bag program unnecessarily blows a gaping hole right through the heart of that laudable goal.

But there is face-saving at stake here, as well as ass-saving, which means it’s simultaneously personal and political, and therefore doubly tricky to negotiate. So instead of hanging onto this failed program as if it were a sliver of the True Cross, do what businesses do: call it a pilot program with a straight face, announce in your best “After School Special” voice that we have all learned a Valuable Lesson about the environment, politics and civic virtue…

..and move the fuck on already.