Down Chicago’s Drain

Plastiki Set to Sail

2010-03-10T03:12:33Z

Inhabitat reports that the Plastiki is finally launched, and waiting to set sail this spring from San Francisco across the Pacific to Sydney. The catamaran is built from 12,500 recycled two-liter bottles and plastic sheets. The 7500-mile journey to Australia kinda puts our 50-mile trip to Joliet to shame. I'll look forward to at least joining the voyage, arm-chair fashion, by reading along online.

The Dirt on Recycling

2010-03-07T21:04:41Z

A NY Times article reports that contracts for Chicago's new separate-source recycling program are being awarded to the same politically connected haulers who made millions off the failed Blue Bag recycling program of the 1990s. Some of them are even the same insiders who scammed millions off the city in the Hired Truck scandal.

Cost of Closing the Canal

2010-02-20T16:19:39Z

Two transportation experts from Michigan are disputing the projected costs of blocking the Illinois Waterway, as claimed by Illinois and government officials. According to the LA Times article, more than 3800 loaded barges pass through the O'Brien Lock yearly, which is located on the Calumet river and is the primary shipping channel connecting the Great Lakes to the Illinois River. The two analysts claim that the $70 million loss to trade of transferring cargo by truck or rail over the closed lock is small in comparison to the $7 billion fishing industry which will be devastated if Asian Carp make it upstream into Lake Michigan. If the lock is closed, I have my doubts that cargo will simply be transferred from barge to truck to boat to hurdle over the barrier. Closing the lock will disrupt barge and towboat traffic along the canal, but how much of the traffic passing through the lock is headed for distant ports? The barges of the canal are not headed out onto Lake Michigan, and the great ocean-going ships are too large to head very far downstream. How much cargo really will be affected if the locks are closed? One other type of traffic that will be affected if the locks are closed are the pleasure boats and tour boats. And will the Chicago Harbor Lock at the mouth of the Chicago River be affected as well? Tour boat operators are fighting against closing the locks as well.

Radio Journey on the Mekong

2010-02-17T17:02:11Z

NPR is running a nice series this week on the Mekong River. Michael Sullivan travels from the headwaters in Tibet all the way down the the delta in Vietnam, talking about the history of the river as well as its current ecological conditions.

Covered in Dust

2010-02-17T04:10:15Z

Here's our sturdy Water Bug trash boat, covered in dust. What to do with it? For the last two years it has been resting in a storage area at JPUSA, but Mike tells me the area will soon be remodelled and built out into a church space. All this junk needs to go! So what should we do with the boat? It would be great to fix it up and take it out on the water again, but I have no place to store it, and in any case it will be several months before the weather is warm enough for any boat trips. To think of all the work we put into building it, it would be a shame to toss it out to the scrappers, but I'm not sure what other options we have.

Elections Nobody Cares About

2010-02-03T15:57:00Z

The Chicago Reader talks to some of the candidates for the board of the Water Reclamation District in the 2010 primary election. As the article points out, what was once an position nobody paid attention to is slowly getting more attention. And now that the results are in, none of the new candidates the Reader interviewed won, only the three incumbents for the board.

Why a Dirty River is Green

2010-01-22T15:54:06Z

As reported in today's Tribune, the Water Reclamation District just completed a study which concludes that fully cleaning the wastewater from the city's sewage plants would increase their carbon footprint and therefore be bad for the environment. So the Chicago River must be degraded in order to save the entire Earth. Chicago is one of the few large cities in the U.S. that does not send its wastewater through a final disinfectant processing, either using chlorination or UV treatment. This requires electricity, so that adding this step to the treatment process would increase the Water Reclamation District carbon footprint if it was used. That is the basis of the argument that not treating the water is better for global warming. By that logic, they should turn off the electricity for the treatment plants entirely. For years the Water Reclamation District has resisted disinfecting its wastewater. They claim that the Chicago River is only used by a handful of recreational boaters, so there is no need to increase costs to benefit a narrow special interest. As long as Chicago is allowed to flush its waste downstream and out of its sight, the waste will be ignored. If the recent lawsuit by the State of Michigan had succeeded in closing off the Shipping Channel which drains our sewage, the Water Reclamation District would have to reconsider its position.

Carp's Day in Court

2010-01-20T16:34:41Z

On Tuesday the Supreme Court refused to hear Michigan's case against Illinois which sought to close the waterway connecting to the Great Lakes to block passage of Asian Carp into Lake Michigan. Also on Tuesday the Army Corps of Engineers announced that carp DNA has been found in Calumet harbor. No carp have yet been found, but DNA evidence seems to indicate at least one fish has made it into the Great Lakes. If a breeding population can get established Lake Michigan, the natural ecosystem and fishing industry will be devastated.

Dreaming of Garbage

2010-01-17T17:05:48Z

On Saturday I attended a screening of the film Garbage Dreams at the Chicago Cultural Center. The film is a gentle portrait of three young men who are learning the traditional garbage collecting trade of the Zaballeen, the waste collecting caste of Cairo. A city of 18 million, Cairo has no formal garbage collection service, just the diligent efforts of the Zaballeen, who haul the refuse back to their homes to sort out the food waste, rags, and recyclables. With these lo-tech methods, they are able to boast recycling rates near 80% and earn a small income. But Cairo dreams of entering the modern world, with a modern trash handling system. Multi-national waste hauling companies are winning contracts to whisk the city's garbage away to new landfills. How will the Zaballeen survive without their traditional business? Can they compete with the modern throwaway world? You will have to see the film to find out. Garbage Dreams will be shown on PBS in April. Check your local station for times.

Carp in Court

2009-12-29T04:16:55Z

A Washington Post article details the lawsuit filed by the State of Michigan against Illinois to close off the water connection of the Chicago and Calumet Rivers to Lake Michigan. The lawsuit also challenges Chicago's exemption from the Great Lakes Compact which allows the city to draw as much as 2 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan, which then leaves the Great Lakes basin into the Mississippi River. If Michigan is successful in its suit, it could possibly force not only the closure of the shipping channels and the end of barge traffic through the Cal-Sag channel, but could also force the city to re-reverse the direction of the Chicago River back toward Lake Michigan, entirely changing the water infrastructure of Chicago and nearby cities.

One Fish Among Thousands

2009-12-04T03:32:00Z

Photos in the Tribune

River Blockade

2009-12-01T19:51:27Z

Those evil invader fish are on the move again! This week the Sanitary & Ship Canal will be closed to boat traffic as the Illinois DNR begins poisoning all fish in a six-mile stretch of the canal near the electric fence above the Lockport Dam. Recently, DNA evidence of Asian Carp was discovered upstream of the electric barricade in several Lake Michigan harbors. The voracious eating habits of these invasive fish threatens other fish and the balance of the entire Great Lakes ecosystem.

Water Pollution

2009-10-19T19:46:05Z

Read Toxic Waters a great series of articles in the New York Times about water pollution in America. The most recent article is about how pollutants cleaned from coal-fired power plants ends up in local waterways.

Stacy Found and Lost Again

2009-05-30T17:08:16Z

Last week a decomposed body was found by cleanup crews along the Illinois River near Channahon, setting off a storm of armchair speculation that it might be famous missing Stacy Peterson, the most recent victim of alleged ladykiller Drew Peterson. Cleanup master Chad Pegracke of the group Living Lands and Waters found the partial skeleton among debris washed up on the forested banks by last years floods. But alas, DNA tests have proved the bones to be from a male. The amateur CSI detectives can all go back to their tabloids without satisfaction.

What's That Cooking?

2009-05-27T16:49:14Z

The Chicago Tribune reports today that a new machine at the Stickney sewage treatment plant is scheduled to go online soon, despite years of cost overruns, mechanical problems, missed deadlines and admissions by officials that the plant is no longer necessary. When we toured the Stickney plant in 2008, our tour guides talked about the new plant as the future of waste treatment. Though we were not allowed to see the inner workings of the machine, the idea is that the wet sludge that is removed from the last settling ponds is pumped to this building, where intense heat kills bacteria and pathogens, cooking the sludge into small pellets which can then be used as fertilizer. Since the contract was awarded for construction of the $217 million plant in 2000, the biosolids produced at the sewage plant have been spread on open air fields in nearby Hodgkins, where sunlight dries and sterilizes the sludge. In 2007 the Tribune ran an investigative article about the insider deals and failures of the company which built the pelletizer plant.