When I usually think of business recycling, I imagine the office environments I have worked in, where the main product seems to be paper. My teenage stepdaughter works at the nearby mall, so we now have a window into the world of retailing from the bottom. The great thing about it for us is that she has learned to fold clothes. Maybe someday she will fold her own and put them away.
We have also learned about all of the boxes that the wholesale sector uses for deliveries to these retail stores. Shipments come in every day. Boxes and boxes of shipments. All of these boxes are just being thrown away. The mall does not have a separate place for recycling cardboard (known as corrugated in the trade). This mall has over 130 businesses. (5 boxes per day per store would be 650 boxes not being recycled every day.) That is a lot of boxes. I am going to ask the mall about setting up corrugated recycling. I think it would save them some money on refuse collection and be a good PR move as well.
And for all of these businesses, cardboard is easy to recycle. Break it down and put it in a separate bin. I would also assume that business cardboard is on the higher end of the recycling scale because it should be cleaner. It was put on a delivery truck, taken off the truck, emptied and discarded.
I have seen corrugated bins at stand-alone fast food joints: Think about all of the boxes of french fries, hamburgers and everything else we consume from these places. And these are small boxes since food can get heavy.
My mall is not the only mall in the country not recycling. Imagine all of the trees not cut down, if these boxes were recycled.
And let’s look at this from an even larger perspective: There are 30,000 7-11 stores worldwide. Each one gets at least 10 boxes a day (my sources tell me). 300,000 boxes a day not being recycled. 2 million a week. Over 100 million boxes a year. That is a lot of trees.
Unfortunately, the people working at all these stores are too busy living day-to-day, some of them working two jobs, or going to college and working, or raising kids as single moms to think about the environmental waste they contribute to every day. Retail is stand-on-your-feet, be-ready-to-help-anyone-at-any-time work, and not the sit-in-the-cube work the rest of us have. Their managers are working just as hard, selling and ordering. There is no time for the environment.
We have to help them help us. Call corporate centers of specific chains and contact local mall offices. Tell them you care.
I think we definitely need to let them know we care, but it is even more important that we put pressure on the government to make recycling programs available for large businesses, right now there is none, businesses need to find private companies to pick up there recyclables and they don’t want to pay the costs.