Founding father of Chicago recycling says city damaged his popular North Side center, but city says it was cleaning up

For Ken Dunn, the tracks told the story.

Dunn, a leader in Chicago recycling for four decades, arrived at work on the morning of Aug. 3 to find chewed-up curbs and heavy tire tracks in the parking lot next to his North Side drop-off center for glass, metals, paper and plastic.

The big metal cargo containers Dunn uses to haul 30 tons of recyclables a week had been pummeled by heavy machinery, he said, their doors broken and holes punched in their walls.

Dunn said carts, bins, ladders and tarps were missing, as were $5,000 worth of tools. Someone had even removed the shelves that held free books and toys for children.

Dunn surmised that intruders had rammed big tractors into his cargo containers and taken or discarded the missing items, costing him $20,000 he doesn’t have.

And he thinks he knows who did it.

What happened in the early morning hours at Dunn’s North Park Village Recycling Station is still in dispute with Dunn, president of the not-for-profit Resource Center, saying that Chicago Streets and Sanitation workers did the damage, and the city saying workers were just cleaning up a site that had been the subject of numerous complaints.

What is clear is that the 40-year-old recycling station is now struggling.

During a recent visit, Dunn pointed out bags of plastic bottles and jugs that were piling up. A volunteer said she worried that Dunn, 80, is working too hard as he tries to catch up, and Dunn said he’s recently started looking into emergency loans.

“We’re operating and open, but it kills us economically to have that loss,” Dunn said.

The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation issued a written statement saying, “After numerous complaints from residents concerning the garbage and debris at the North Park Recycling Center, the City cleaned the property on August 3, 2022.”

Dunn called that version of events “amazing.”

“Sometimes you clean with a broom and dustpan — and sometimes you clean with a big tractor that crushes most things you knock around. Bad choice on their part,” Dunn said dryly.

In response to Dunn’s specific complaints, Streets and Sanitation said, “The North Park Village Recycling Station is located on city-owned land. The cleaning was completed during normal work hours, and no items were damaged or stolen during the cleaning process.”

The department also offered “before” photos that showed some trash or unbundled recyclables at the site, some big green plastic bags of material piled along a fence and some large items that appeared to have been dumped, such as an old mattress.

Illegal dumping has been a problem at the site, Dunn said, and he had requested a no-dumping sign from the city the day before the incident.

During a recent visit to the recycling station, materials waiting to be recycled appeared to be clean and there were no smells. The metal bins were weathered — one has been in use since 1971 — and the lettering on them was hand-painted. Dozens of garbage bags filled with plastics were stacked 6 feet high along a fence. Dunn said plastics were piling up as he scrambled to repair the Aug. 3 damage.

The total effect was a bit ramshackle, but cheerful and organized, with volunteer Linda Young, a retiree, saying Dunn has a strong local following.

“He’s amazing,” she said. “Many people help him, love him, because of what he does. As you can see, we bring our stuff here because he cares about the environment.”

This is not the first time that Dunn, a Kansas farmer’s son who studied for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Chicago, has faced a setback in his quest to make Chicago a greener place.

He’s been fighting a sometimes lonely battle ever since he started transforming vacant South Side lots into community gardens in the 1970s.

When Chicago began its first municipal recycling program under Mayor Harold Washington, Dunn ran a showcase pilot project in the Beverly neighborhood on the Southwest Side. At one point, the Resource Center reported that about 60% of Beverly residents were separating newspapers, aluminum cans and other recyclable material from their garbage and leaving them at the curb in blue boxes, according to The Associated Press.

Dunn said some city officials tried to end his recycling contract when Washington died in 1987. He went to court and won, but he suspects he made enemies along the way.

In the early 1990s, city officials revoked his permit to recycle at the North Park Village Recycling Station site, Dunn said, but public support — and periodic assists from public figures — allowed him to stay open.

Among those who came to Dunn’s defense over the years was Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who championed the North Park Village Recycling Station during a 1997 debate on whether to replace it with more parking spaces for a gymnastics center.

The center, Kass wrote, is “a little bit of messy magic and the kind of special place that deserves saving.”

Through it all, Dunn developed a wide-ranging portfolio of sustainability projects, encompassing composting, recycling, food recovery and urban farming.

“Ken has been an important player in green initiatives in Chicago for the last few decades,” said Sadhu Johnston, the city’s chief environmental officer from 2005 to 2009.

Johnston said he couldn’t comment on the current controversy because he doesn’t know the details, but when he was in Chicago, Dunn was a role model: “He was pursuing really innovative approaches, and he was on the ground doing really important work.”

Johnston added that “from what I can tell, Ken works at the grassroots and works with very little resources, and the result of that can be messy. I can understand at the scale he’s working that the city would want to make sure that it’s done in a way that isn’t creating an issue for (neighbors).”

The Tribune named Dunn the greenest man in Chicago in 2008, based on a detailed analysis of his personal carbon footprint. Dunn produced only 3,800 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, as compared with the 44,000 pounds produced by the average American, according to an analysis performed for the Tribune.

In 2007, Chicago Magazine ran a profile with the headline, “Somebody Give This Guy a Genius Grant: Ken Dunn embodies an American ideal of intelligence, an extraordinary melding of farmer and philosopher. He just might be the smartest man in the city. And he grows magnificent tomatoes.”

Dunn’s hair was gray, his face lined during a recent interview, but his blue eyes shone as brightly as ever as he spoke about an imitation prairie he built at an urban farm in Washington Park.

There’s a clay liner so that water doesn’t drain away from the roots of the plants, with highly absorbent wood chips and compost above. Even with today’s high levels of precipitation, there’s never any runoff, Dunn said.

“I even got a fine from the city for building this farm without stormwater drainage,” he said with a chuckle. “They wanted that stormwater — why would they want the stormwater? I want it for my plants.”

The compost and wood chips hold water, so even after a month of no rain, you don’t have to water plants with roots longer than 4 inches.

And, in an era when climate change is bringing heavier rains and concerns about flooded basements, Dunn sees another potential benefit: “We can’t keep building the sewers bigger because it’s going to get worse, but we could make every park and every backyard (an imitation prairie that keeps) rainwater where it falls.”

One of his favorite topics is recycling itself, and specifically, his objections to single-stream recycling, in which consumers don’t have to sort their recyclables. Single stream is convenient and may encourage broader participation, but contamination can render materials unrecyclable.

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“Would you rather be told you recycle — even though you might not know it’s being recycled — or would you rather be clear that it’s absolutely being recycled?” he asked.

As Dunn spoke, people wandered in, dropping off plastic jugs and metal cans.

“I love this place. It’s awesome,” said Rick Ratliff, 53, of Old Irving Park, who said he’s been bringing Dunn his recyclables for 30 years. “You know, I really like coming here and making sure things are going to get recycled.”

Still, Young, the volunteer, got wistful when she talked about what used to be. She spread her arms to indicate the size of the “free stuff” shelf that disappeared Aug. 3. It had been armpit high and 5 feet wide, she said, and local teachers would sometimes come by with their classes and let excited children pick out free books.

There were carts and pallets with wheels to make visits easier for customers, she said. There were neat stacks of newspapers, piled to just the right height in giant metal containers.

“I just wish with all my heart and soul we would have had the pictures to show you how organized it was,” Young said.

nschoenberg@chicagotribune.com