Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks Monday with young people in Coca-Cola T-shirts before he announces a new partnership with the soft drink giant at Fernwood Park on the Far South Side.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday announced his latest partnership with Coca-Cola: The soft drink giant will pay for 50,000 blue recycling carts for Chicago homes and in return gets to put images of Coke products on the lids of the familiar bins.

Emanuel tied the $2.59 million grant to Earth Day, saying the company was helping Chicago become "a greener, more sustainable city," even though the mayor previously had credited himself for saving enough money to pay for citywide recycling by switching to grid-based garbage pickup.
Unmentioned at the mayor's news conference was that photos of bottles of Coke and cartons of Coke-owned Minute Maid orange juice will be part of the diagrams on the Coke-purchased blue carts that explain to residents what they can and cannot recycle. Many other city recycling bins feature images of generic, unlabeled bottles.

Under the terms of the deal, Coke's philanthropic arm, the Coca-Cola Foundation, will pay for 25,000 household blue carts this year as part of Emanuel's push to finally extend recycling to every house and small apartment building in Chicago by the end of the year. The company will pay for another 25,000 carts over the next five years to replace those that get damaged around the city.
In exchange, Coca-Cola, which has been fighting government efforts around the country to place restrictions on its sugary beverages, gets to be linked to a large-scale environmentally friendly program in a big city.

"We see this as an incredible way to be able to give back to Chicago, give back to the United States, and to be able to keep our pledge, which is to be sure that every bottle, plastic bottle, can in which our products are packaged and sold will find its way back into a recycling bin," said Sonya Soutus, a Coca-Cola marketing executive who joined Emanuel in front of stacks of blue carts at a news conference at a park in the Roseland community area.

Coca-Cola's contribution replaces city revenue that would have paid for the carts, according to city spokesman Bill McCaffrey. The Emanuel administration did not need the Coke money to complete the household recycling rollout, he said. No plans have been finalized about what the city will do with the money it saves thanks to the corporate contribution, McCaffrey said.
Emanuel's appearances alongside Coca-Cola executives have become a common sight in recent months. The public initiatives began last October, when the mayor was joined by top Coke executive Steve Cahillane and other soft drink executives to announce that Chicago would compete this year against San Antonio for a $5 million national beverage lobbying group grant rewarding city workers for being healthy.

At the time, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was fighting to limit the size of sodas sold in some businesses there, and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had ordered city departments to phase out the sale and advertising of sugary drinks to fight obesity and rising health care costs.
Emanuel, however, said he believed in "personal responsibility" and struck a deal with the soft drink manufacturers to include calorie information alongside their products on vending machines in city buildings. The move was criticized as a half measure by some advocates for healthy eating.
In November, Cahillane came to a Near West Side park to announce that Coke would contribute $3 million for Chicago Park District nutrition classes to fight obesity and diabetes as well as exercise classes run by armed forces veterans.

Asked then whether he could do more for children's health by limiting their access to sugary drinks, Emanuel said Coca-Cola's contributions were complementing his efforts to improve kids' lives. Emanuel's predecessor Richard Daley sits on Coke's board of directors.