Recycling at Work

I am the Assistant Manager at the best pizza joint in town, and it's in our historic downtown area. The area is fairly walkable, although tourists and employees of local businesses have difficulty parking in the area.

The building I work in has a hot dog joint next door and 2 floors of apartment upstairs. I think there are 10-12 apartments in the building. Yay for mixed use! Boo for an old building that desperately needs renovation. Our water pressure changes when someone upstairs takes a shower or uses the only washer in the building. There's a certain spot in the kitchen where you can smell pot smoke if someone upstairs happens to be partaking. Every once in a while a small animal makes it inside the building, sometimes even into the restaurant!!

The Town requires any restaurant selling alcohol to recycle the glass bottle or aluminum can the alcohol comes in. But they are not required to recycle anything else, so they don't. Some restaurants and shopping centers have corrugated cardboard recycling, but our small building doesn't! I didn't realize this until I had been working there for a few months; I was helping carry boxes upstairs and out the back of the building to where I thought a cardboard dumpster would be!

That was when I decided to take recycling matters into my own hands.

Every day, I load my car up with corrugated cardboard boxes, beer boxes, aluminum and steel cans, and plastic bottles. There are two recycling convenience centers between work and home, so for me this isn't a big deal. I have been recycling everything at home for the last 5 years or so. My husband has taken some training, and every once in a while he still throws away something that can be recycled. (I usually see it and fish it out rather quickly.)

Over the last 2 years, I have managed to train my fellow workers to stop throwing recycling away. New employees are trained to recycle! The night shift will leave boxes or empty cleaning supply bottles for me to recycle the next day if they know I'm coming in. I occasionally get teased for pulling recycling out of the trash barrel, (don't worry, I always wash my hands after!) but I am reinforcing the importance of recycling to the 15 people I work with.