Politicizing the Treadmill of Production: Reshaping Social Outcomes of "Efficient Recycling"

Much contemporary environmental policymaking shifts our political focus away from ecological goals towards creating "economically efficient" programs. Most social scientists have also paid limited attention to the social distributive outcomes of such policies, despite the reality that these outcomes can expand or contract political constituencies for environmental protection. We trace this shift and its impacts in a "tale of two cities" in the U.S. - Chicago and its northern suburb of Evanston, Illinois - as they constructed and implemented curbside recycling programs. Although both cities implemented programs in the same decade, the rationale, goals, and means were dramatically different in the two municipalities. Although both communities recruited unskilled labor for the actual sorting jobs, the Chicago facility offered a repressive and regressive mode of labor control, essentially reducing low-income workers to a day-labor category of contingent worker. In contrast, Evanston offered both life-skills training to its workers, and assistance in getting employment at the end of their recycling jobs. In addition to explaining the differential outcomes of these two programs, we explore the factors that led each community's decisionmakers to select their parameters of "curbside recycling." This led to quite different technologies - capital-intensive in the case of Chicago, and labor-intensive in the case of Evanston - and even more sharply different managerial protocols. These differences suggest the necessity of more political involvement in the actual policy-making process in environmental policies.