Thursday, April 2, 2009

This is how it happens.

I mentioned in a previous post that folks say that they are only one person, so they can't change the world. I went on to point out that changes usually starts with individuals and grows. from there. I had that lesson reinforced today.

I manage 2 town home communities. At the one I live in, I was able to work with the local sanitation commission and get us involved with the curbside recycling program. We have about 25% of our community that consistently participate and close to 50% that sporadically participate.
In the other property, no curbside program exists for multi-family housing, so I take an extra recycling bin from where I live and use it in my office.

Over the first few weeks of collecting recyclables in my office , if I reminded the maintenance men at lunch time, they would hand me their empty soda bottles or cans. Then they began remembering on their own. One father /son team who works on my property sporadically, took to recycling right off, always remembering to drop off their recyclables from lunch.

After a few weeks, when they had not worked on my property, they came in to do some work and dropped about 10 empty soda bottles in the recycling bin. They had been saving them in their truck because they figured they would be back around me sometime. Today, my regular maintenance man walked in with a large trash bag slammed full of crushed soda bottles. The father/son team sent them.

This is how change happens.

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