Urban recycling and the search for sustainable community development / Adam S. Weinberg, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-215) and index.

Print version record.

One Urban Recycling: An Empirical Test of Sustainable Community Development Proposals -- Sustainable Community Development -- Recycling as a Case Study in Sustainable Community Development -- The Rise of Recycling: Why Waste a Resource? -- Contemporary Recycling Practices -- The Chicago Region as a Locale for Examining Recycling and Sustainable Community Development -- Two The Challenge to Achieve Sustainable Community Development: A Theoretical Framework -- The Treadmill of Production as a Modern Political-Economic Model -- Conflict, Power, and Dialectics: A Political Economy Perspective -- Allocating Scarcity: A Central Parameter -- Political Consciousness in the Managed Scarcity Synthesis -- The Treadmill of Production and Recycling: Overt and Covert Conflicts -- Limitations of Our Analysis -- Three Chicagos Municipally Based Recycling Program: Origins and Outcomes of a Corporate-Centered Approach -- Who Is Riding the Tiger? The Alliance between the City of Chicago and Waste Management, Incorporated -- Promises and Pitfalls of the Blue Bag Program -- Early Problems with the Blue Bag: Miscalculating Start-up Costs and Recovery Rates -- Occupational Safety Issues: Challenges and Responses -- Reclaiming the MRRFs: Chicagos Attempt to Regain Control -- Conclusion: The Blue Bag Program and the Three Es of Sustainable Community Development -- Four Community-Based Recycling: The Struggles of a Social Movement -- Community-Based Recycling Centers -- The Model for Community-Based Recycling Centers: The Resource Center -- Replicating the Resource Center: Uptown Recycling, Incorporated -- Limitations of the Community-Based Model -- Social Movement Struggles in a Global Marketplace: The Demise of Community-Based Recycling? -- Moving toward the Three Es: Assessing the Achievements of the Community-Based Centers -- Community-Based Sustainable Development Enterprises: Doing Good but Not Doing Well -- Five Industrial Recycling Zones and Parks: Creating Alternative Recycling Models.

Environmental Movements and Industrial Ecology: The Logic of Recycling Parks and Recycling Zones -- Promises in Maywood -- Reviving West Garfield Park: The Bethel New Life Story -- Resistance to Innovations: DuPage County and Gary, Indiana -- Planning for Industrial Recycling Zones: Is Ecological Modernization in Our Future? -- Six Social Linkage Programs: Recycling Practices in Evanston -- Finding Alternatives: The Road to Locating the Three Es -- Recycling Working as a Social Linkage: The Rise of the PIC Program in Evanston -- Delinking the Evanston Program: The New Bottom Line Orientation to Local Recycling -- Understanding the Dimensions of Variability in Recycling Programs -- Searching for Sustainable Development: Do Technology and Scale Matter? -- Seven The Treadmill of Production: Toward a Political-Economic Grounding of Sustainable Community Development -- Revisiting the Treadmill of Production -- The Globalizing Treadmill -- The States Ambivalent Role in Managing the Treadmill -- Grounding Sustainable Community Development in the Treadmill of Production -- Conclusion: Relationships in the Treadmill -- Eight The Search for Sustainable Community Development: Final Notes and Thoughts -- The Political Economy of Solid Waste Management -- Critical Social Science: Power, Education, Community, and Politics -- The Economic Geography of Waste: Generalizing beyond Chicago and beyond Recycling -- Final Reflections.

More Americans recycle than vote. And most do so to improve their communities and the environment. But do recycling programs advance social, economic, and environmental goals? To answer this, three sociologists with expertise in urban and environmental planning have conducted the first major study of urban recycling. They compare four types of programs in the Chicago metropolitan area: a community-based drop-off center, a municipal curbside program, a recycling industrial park, and a linkage program. Their conclusion, admirably elaborated, is that recycling can realize sustainable community development, but that current programs achieve few benefits for the communities in which they are located. The authors discover that the history of recycling mirrors many other urban reforms. What began in the 1960s as a sustainable community enterprise has become a commodity-based, profit-driven industry. Large private firms, using public dollars, have chased out smaller nonprofit and family-owned efforts. Perhaps most troubling is that this process was not born of economic necessity. Rather, as the authors show, socially oriented programs are actually more viable than profit-focused systems. This finding raises unsettling questions about the prospects for any sort of sustainable local development in the globalizing economy. Based on a decade of research, this is the first book to fully explore the range of impacts that recycling generates in our communities. It presents recycling as a tantalizing case study of the promises and pitfalls of community development. It also serves as a rich account of how the state and private interests linked to the global economy alter the terrain of local neighborhoods.

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