Old Dogs

While working in bars I began to notice all the things that we threw away that could have been recycled. It made me so angry to know that there were hundreds of bottles from one bar being thrown out on a daily basis. At one bar I worked at we only served bottled beer. When I started working there I thought that we recycled since we put all the bottles back in the boxes. When I started working nights, I realized that we did not recycle and the boxes were thrown away each night full of glass bottles. When I started counting the amount of empty bottles in cases on busy nights, it made me sick.

So I proposed something to my boss and co-workers. I had started taking as many cases would fit into my Kia home with me each night, which was only about 6. I would take them and put them in my recycling bin or take them to our recycling center in town. I asked everyone else if they would be willing. Since it was Texas, and everyone drove trucks, they could take a good amount and wouldn't have to empty it each night. No one would do it! They just didn't understand the importance of recycling.

After I quit that job, I moved on to another bar in town. Everyone called it the "liberal arts" or "hippie love" bar. I knew most of the employees there because they were mostly Geography majors and I had taken some classes with them and we had been to some "green" events together. When I brought the recycling idea up to them, they said that it could happen there but they just needed a few more employees to help take recycling each night. We worked out a schedule and talked to our boss about it. He gave us a few rules about the recycling, but we got it working and it worked well. Then, we decided that since our boss wanted the bar to be a restaurant, but food sales sucked and we were throwing food away each night, that we needed to start composting. We convinced our boss of this as well and made sure the food went home each night with employees or customers who had gardens that needed it.

Now the reason why I mention THIS boss is because he is not the guy who would usually go for recycling of composting. I have heard him say many times that he "loves his gas-guzzlin F-250". Somehow though, after years of hiring all us "hippies", we had convinced him of doing something a little bit environmentally friendly. He even started helping with the recycling and would fill up the back of his truck once a week.

I don't know if he actually cared about it or just did it because we had been bugging him about it and it still got taken care of. I know he enjoyed the fact that there was much more room in our trash cans each night and we no longer had problems with raccoons getting in the trash because the tops wouldn't close.