National "Feed The Cart" Campaign and Mascot ‘Loop’ Come to Evanston: Cart Tagging to Begin September 16

The City and the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) are bringing a friendly new face to town this month to help residents reduce contamination in the materials they recycle and improve their overall recycling efforts, while encouraging those who don’t recycle to participate.

“Loop” is the recycling education champion of the Feed The Cart awareness campaign launched last year by SWANCC, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, and its partners that is engaging residents across a six-county region of Metro Chicago by promoting the environmental and economic benefits of recycling.

The googly-eyed recycling cart mascot is designed to make recycling education informative, memorable, and accessible for audiences of all ages. The aim of the Feed The Cart campaign is to increase recycling tonnage across the Chicago metro region by 15% before 2030.

Cart tagging will begin September 16

Feed The Cart and Loop are the 2026 highlights of Evanston’s fourth annual cart-tagging program aimed at preventing contaminated materials from going into recycling carts. This involves staff with the City’s Public Works Agency visually inspecting several recycling carts before they are collected on pickup day, usually for about 15-30 seconds.

Staff will work directly with residents to explain what can and cannot be recycled at the curb. A paper tag featuring the “Loop” image will be distributed to the audited household’s front door or mailbox. Staff will mark “Thank You!” when all visible materials are good recyclables or “Oops!” to identify items that don’t belong in the recycling cart. 

This year’s cart tagging activities will take place in the Wednesday and Thursday pickup zones on Sept. 16-17, Sept. 23-24, Sept. 30-Oct. 1 and Oct. 7-8, and results will be announced in mid-November.

Since Evanston’s residential curbside cart-tagging initiative began, the City has audited 1,825 homes. That total represents about 12% of households audited so far of the approximately 14,600 residential units within the City’s recycling program service footprint. This year, 200 households from the Wednesday collection zone and 200 households from the Thursday zone will be audited.

Data since Evanston’s cart-tagging focus began in 2023 show:

• On average, 8 of 10 Evanston households utilize their recycling cart each week.
• Households that used their recycling cart had no contamination present a little over half the time. This equates to 4 out of every 10 households having no contamination present.
• The most frequently contaminated item deposited in recycling carts was recyclables placed in a plastic bag; recyclables should not be bagged because the recycling facility is not able to sort the material inside. That’s why materials should be deposited as loosely as possible in the cart.

The negative impacts of recycling contamination include:

• Increases your cost to recycle – More contamination requires more processing after collection, which means costs for recycling go up. Those costs get passed on to you, the resident.
• Sends more, not less, material to the landfill – If contamination is significant, all materials in the cart – or worse, an entire truckload from hundreds of carts – will be landfilled despite some being “good” recyclables.
• Impacts climate change – Increasing the amount of solid waste sent to landfills leads to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.  

The Metropolitan Mayors Caucus and its campaign partners, including SWANCC, the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County (SWALCO), as well as DuPage, Kane, McHenry, and Will counties, were awarded a $2 million grant in 2024 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to support the Feed the Cart campaign’s recycling education and outreach.