Why a DuPage County Board member wants just a single trash hauler in unincorporated areas

While some homeowners in DuPage County's unincorporated areas enjoy the freedom to choose their own waste hauler, the neighborhoods have up to five trash days on their streets, creating concerns about pollution, noise and wear and tear on the roads.

If she can garner the support, one county board member is trying to standardize the system for six townships: Wayne, Bloomingdale, Addison, Winfield, Milton and York.

“All of the municipalities in the county have a single trash hauler contract, but in the unincorporated areas — with the exception of Naperville, Lisle and Downers Grove townships — we do not,” said Sheila Rutledge, who also serves as the county's environmental committee chair. “In most of those six remaining township areas, there are six trash haulers. If you've got six companies servicing a street, that's 12 trash trucks a week, where if it was a single contract, two would be the max.”

Rutledge, who lives in an unincorporated area near Winfield, said her main concern is the environmental impact of the trucks.

According to a 2017 article published in Sustainable Production and Consumption, garbage trucks have considerably low fuel economy and large amounts of tailpipe emissions.

“Due to their frequent stop-and-go driving nature, large payloads and use of onboard devices, refuse collection trucks consume significantly more fuel even compared to other types of heavy-duty trucks,” according to the article. “Current literature shows that refuse collection trucks consume as much as 1.2 billion gallons of diesel each year, and the combustion of such large amounts of fuel leads to significant environmental impacts.”

While the townships individually could enter into waste hauling contracts by way of referendum, Rutledge is proposing an ordinance that would be approved through a county board vote.

Last year, Lake County did just that when its board entered into two waste hauling contracts — each covering one half of the county's 15,000 unincorporated homes.

The change came amid a controversial leaf burning ban, spurred by concerns that residents in unincorporated areas didn't have the yard waste pickup services to adapt to the new regulations.

Walter Willis, executive director of the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County, said the contracts also made sense from a productivity and cost standpoint.

“With the ability to have one hauler be more efficient in their routing and their collection, a truck can pick up 700 homes a day,” he said. “If it's bouncing all over the place looking for homes, driving here and there, they can do about 300 or 400 a day. You can see that the productivity goes down and the costs go up when you don't have a franchise.”

Willis said hiring a hauler in an unincorporated area typically costs about $30 a month per household, whereas municipal contracts even out to about $20 a month per household.

That number translated relatively true within Lake County's new contracts: LRS charges $19.95 per month per household in servicing the southern quadrants of the county, and Groot charges $20.52 in servicing the northwest quadrant.

In the less populated northeastern quadrant of Lake County, where 1-acre lot homes are more spread out, Groot's price is $25.78.

“I've seen it with municipalities that franchise for the first time and people lose that choice, you get a little pushback from some people, but that's normal,” Willis said. “Now that the program has been up and running for over a year, I haven't heard any complaints. It's a five-year contract, and I think everything worked out pretty well.”

Rutledge is looking to gather community support in DuPage before moving ahead with her proposal.

“The amount of contracts we end up with will depend on the enthusiasm within each township,” Rutledge said in an email. “We may not contract all six of the remaining townships if the voters overwhelmingly are uninterested.”

She is fielding survey responses from the county's 20,000 residents who live in the six unincorporated areas in question. The questionnaire asks homeowners about their current hauler and monthly costs, as well as their thoughts on a potential single hauler contract.

Al Hollenbeck, a Winfield Township resident, said there are trucks on his street five days a week. A retired civil engineer, Hollenbeck said that in addition to noise, public safety and air pollution, the damage to township roads also is an important consideration.

“A typical refuse truck might be 30,000 to 40,000 pounds. A typical car may be 3,000 or 4,000 pounds. The actual weight is 10 times as much, but that's not the true impact,” Hollenbeck said. “The impact of a refuse truck payment is exponential. It's at least equivalent to 1,000 cars — one refuse truck.”

This exponential effect of heavy trucks on roads has been long documented, including by the U.S. General Accounting Office in a 1979 study that determined the impact of a single 18-wheeler was equivalent to the damage caused by 9,600 cars.

Whatever the result of Rutledge's proposal, Hollenbeck commends the county's transparent process in considering the change.

“It's a great example of local government looking into something that could work out and be a better service than it currently is, and not forcing it down anybody's throat without some input,” Hollenbeck said. “However this ends up, I think the process has been well done.”

• Jenny Whidden is a climate change and environment writer working with the Daily Herald through a partnership with Report For America supported by The Nature Conservancy. To help support her work with a tax-deductible donation, see dailyherald.com/rfa.