The Obstacles

Whether it’s surprising or unsurprising, I have had to overcome quite a few obstacles and setbacks on my adventures in recycling.

And be they small or large, they are obstacles nonetheless.

The smallest and most insignificant, as I mentioned before, is the fact that no matter how in-your-face I am about recycling, people still throw things in the trash. Hence the development of getting over my fear of pulling recycling out of said trash. Hence me kindly berating my coworkers in my own department about them throwing a can away right in front of me.

The next obstacle I’ve had to face is with my own management. Be it in-store, or at the corporate level. Whenever our corporate office has a visit to our store, someone almost always takes it upon themselves to throw out my recycling box into the trash, with the recycling. I don’t know if it’s someone from corporate or another associate who thinks someone will throw a fit if they see the box in our break room, even if it’s out of sight of customers.

And mind you that I have actually sent an official recycling proposal to the head honcho himself, the owner of the entire company. I worked out an entire plan to reduce our paper waste and the money we spent on paper. These people don’t care about the environment, but they do care about money. So I attempted to appeal to that.

I compared how much money we spend on paper each month, just in one store, to how much money we could make back if we recycled our paper waste and got the money from that recycling. It wasn’t enough to cover the yearly expense we spent on paper in the first place, but it would cover about 30% of the cost nonetheless. And that was just in one store. Multiply that by the number of stores we had, and it would have been a HUGE difference.

I even went on to say that we could make money recycling cans and bottles, depending on the state the store was located in. I suggested we take all the cardboard boxes from receiving and recycle those for cash instead of tossing them. I also mentioned that customers were always asking to give us their old batteries to recycle, and we could make money off of the e-waste from that. I even suggested that since the store was so empty for the first two hours we were open every day, that we could save money on electricity and labor if we opened an hour or two later.

And even though our corporation encourages ideas and perpetuates that you will be heard by the higher ups if you have something to say, they completely ignored me on this proposal.

I asked our district manager if they had received it, and he said they had, but decided they weren’t interested in doing anything at that time. And he made the comment that they also didn’t want any singular person doing it as it would be a liability; that person could claim that they weren’t being compensated for their time or something.

Luckily, I hadn’t mentioned that I was doing this already, and had been for a while. And I wasn’t about to stop. I didn’t care about the money, about compensation, or recognition. I cared about the fact that this is my home and I wanted to do my part to make it look nice.

So despite my management turning my proposal down, I continued doing what I could do on my own. And over time, I did notice that there were subtle changes made. We used to print our warranties on regular sized paper, where if the customer purchased one, their entire receipt along with the terms and conditions were printed out; sometimes more than ten pages. About a year after my proposal, they started printing them out on the actual receipts. And, they recently changed our store hours to open an hour later. But I think that’s more of an operating cost concern rather than an environmental one.

Now, within my store, my store manager has allowed me to have my box in the break room and collect the recycling. For the most part, she’s let me do me. But one day she saw me grabbing two shopping bags from the front check out, and she lost it on me.

She questioned what I was doing with them, and when I told her they were for the recycling she told me, “No! Those are for customers only!” I told her I’ve been doing this for over a year now, and she threatened to not allow me to recycle AT ALL anymore. And then she walked away.

I was so mad, so in disbelief. And I looked at it in the macro aspect; if things were so bad financially that she was going to freak out about me taking a couple plastic bags, which probably cost a couple cents, if that, to make, then she had bigger things to worry about.

So, I started sneaking the bags. I’d grab them ahead of time and made sure she wasn’t anywhere near me. And, I noticed coworkers started leaving their plastic bags for me in my box when they were done with their lunch, so I didn’t have to take as many.

She hasn’t said anything since, but I think she also forgot she had that interaction with me in the first place. Still, I make sure to be careful about when I’m leaving the store with bags of recycling in my hands.

Continuing on, the next biggest obstacle I’ve faced is perhaps the unknown people who took it upon themselves to actually try and stand in my way.

To this day, I do not know who was doing these things. For a period of about three months, I would occasionally come into the break room, and my box would be in the trash. Or, the box would be on the counter, but someone had thrown out my recycling and put the box back!

And then someone started doing things to my box.

They would throw their actual trash in there. A TV dinner tray turned upside down so the leftovers got all over the bottles. Which meant I would have to wash those bottles off, so I wouldn’t have spoiled food sitting in my car attached to those bottles.

And then one day they set the bar even higher, or lower in my opinion.

I came into work, and someone had taken an ENTIRE cup of noodle, cooked and all, and dumped it into my box. There were noodles everywhere, and my box was soggy at the bottom with the broth.

And in the process of removing the recycling so I could throw the box out, I noticed someone had defaced it.

On the places where I had written “please recycle”, they had crossed it off and wrote “Fuck you” on one side, and “CUNT BITCH” on the other.

I didn’t know how to feel. I was hurt, and angry, and sad.

I didn’t know who it was. There were a couple people I knew didn’t like me, but were they really THAT petty? Did they really hate me that much that this was how they thought they could hurt me?

And that was the funny thing about it. If they REALLY wanted to hurt me, they would have just thrown it out while I was off, so I couldn’t regather my recycling since they knew I would take it back out of the trash. And I’m of the mindset that if you’re going to try and hurt me or my feelings, you don’t need to hurt the Earth in the process of it. Leave that out of the equation.

To this day, I have only an idea of who might have done it. Who it was doesn’t matter. What matters is that it hurt. But it didn’t stop me. I washed off my recycling, and I threw out that box. It was getting gross anyways. I found a new box. A bigger box. And I recycled more than ever.  What’s important is that no matter what, I have not stopped doing what I think is right, no matter what or who stands in my way.