mobanmarketSKOKIE, IL — After a record number of participants last year, Skokie’s annual community recycling event returns to the Westfield Old Orchard parking lot Sunday.
The “Spring Greening” event is scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. on the west side of the shopping center, with a north entrance at Old Orchard Road and Lavergne Avenue, as well as a south entrance at Golf Road and Lawler Avenue.
Everyone is invited to drop off items to be reused or recycled, including electronics, books, clothing and other items.
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“It’s a really fantastic event,” said organizer Lee Hansen, of the Skokie Park District. “It’s kind of one-stop shopping for getting rid of, and repurposing and recycling a lot of the things that we accumulate and putting them to good use.”
The event started in 2011 and, for its first nine years, was held in the parking lot of Niles North High School. The 2020 edition was canceled due to the coronavirus, and it resumed with a reduced scope the following year to the Old Orchard lot.
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In 2022, when a full-scale Spring Greening was held, more than 1,200 cars came through to drop off items, the largest crowd to date, according to Hansen.
“It worked out beautifully, with the exception of when people come early they have to wait, we have to put them in a queue,” Hansen said.
“We’re really encouraging people to come — if you want to avoid the line, that backlog — to come after 11 a.m.,” she said. “Last year, after the event started at 10 a.m., by 10:45 a.m. the lines were moving through.”
The drop-off event’s south lot features electronics waste and document shredding. Up to four bank box-sized containers of documents will be shredded on site — not including photos, plastics, photos, clips or documents from businesses or institutions.
The north lot includes reuse/recycling stations to drop off:
The Spring Greening is sponsored by Niles Township government, Lakeshore Recycling Systems, Westfield Old Orchard and Imperial Realty Company and presented by the village, park district, public library, chamber of commerce, public high school district and solid waste agency.
While the event is open to residents of any town, electronic waste recycling and document destruction services are limited to those who live in north suburban Cook County municipalities that comprise the Solid Waste of North Cook County.
They include: Arlington Heights, Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove Village, Evanston, Glencoe, Glenview, Hoffman Estates, Inverness, Kenilworth, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Mount Prospect, Niles, Palatine, Park Ridge, Prospect Heights, Rolling Meadows, Skokie, South Barrington, Wheeling, Wilmette and Winnetka.
Map of Skokie’s Spring Greening Community Recycling Event:
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