North Park Village Recycling Center Closed For Good - Block Club Chicago

North Park Village Recycling Center Closed For Good

NORTH PARK — The 81-year-old owner of a nonprofit recycling center in North Park is calling it quits.

Ken Dunn, founder and president of the Resource Center, said he’s run out of money to continue operating the North Park Village Recycling Station, 5801 N. Pulaski Road. He doesn’t even have a working truck to haul recyclables, he said.

“We just haven’t raised the money to keep it going, and I don’t even have a truck that is operational. So it is closed,” Dunn said. “A truck I depended on for 50 years finally reached a point where it was too expensive to keep operating.”

For more than 40 years, Dunn has managed the independently operated recycling station.

But neighbors taking their recyclables to the site this week were greeted by a handwritten sign that said “This place is closed” and overflowing cardboard and other items.

In addition to not having the funds to repair his workhorse truck, Dunn said his age played a factor in his decision to end operations in North Park this month.

“We had a good run,” Dunn said.

Dunn has been praised as one of the city’s greenest residents, converting vacant lots into gardens and urban farms since 1968. His nonprofit, Resource Center, ran three dropoff locations across the city, including the one at North Park.

The other sites are also closed, he said.

“They’ll be no more public dropoffs run by the Resource Center,” Dunn said.

For years, neighbors would haul their recyclables to the dropoff area. They would sort items into large, often-overflowing metal containers, separating plastics from aluminum, glass, metal, paper and cardboard. Makeshift signs and volunteers helped to keep things orderly and enforce the rules: No dumping. No furniture, electronics or styrofoam. Newspapers go here; boxes must be flattened and stacked there.

Last year, Dunn clashed with city crews after he said they removed or damaged thousands of dollars of recycling equipment from the station. Getting the station back up and running drained his financial reserves, he said.

Fans of Dunn created a fundraising campaign to support the recycling center, raising $6,845 of its $10,000 goal. But by September, the final truck in his fleet was out of commission, causing the dropoffs to begin piling up at North Park, Dunn said.

“I don’t see a route to raising money to open it again. The one truck I’d been using will cost about $20,000 to get the repairs done. So I’m afraid I’m not able to keep that site open,” Dunn said.

Ald. Samantha Nugent’s (39th) office is working with the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation and Dunn to clean the site, but there’s no timeline yet for when that will happen, said Adam Roberts, Nugent’s chief of staff.

“I asked Mr. Dunn what he would like the timeline to be, making sure that he has agency in the process and is given a dignified exit,” Roberts said.

Dunn is a proponent of source separation, which entails sorting reusable materials like paper, glass and cans to prevent contamination and ensure they can be recycled.

The city uses single-stream recycling, where recyclables are mixed together in a collection truck rather than sorted by material type.

Dunn has asked Nugent’s office and Streets and Sanitation to continue his preferred practice of source separation as they gear up to clean the North Park site, he said.

“We have to not have glass shards with plastics and papers, because that makes them only available for energy production,” Dunn said.

Critics of single-stream recycling say it can lead to more potentially reusable items ending up in a landfill due to contamination, according to NPR.

Dunn hopes his fans and other Chicagoans concerned about the environment continue to advocate for source-separation recycling in the city’s recycling program now that his nonprofit is winding down, he said.

“Not separating your recyclables and just putting everything in one truck is more profitable. And so that’s what more people are doing,” Dunn said. “But that can’t really prevent glass bottles from breaking and soiling everything else you’re recycling when you do that.”

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