Recycling When It Was More Difficult

Alison Palmer • Jan 08, 2017

Recycling Used to Be a Pain in the Neck Can you remember back to the days before Tidewater cities finally jumped on board the recycling bandwagon?  In the olden days (in the ’80s) if you were a forward thinking person who cared about the environment, you may have wanted to recycle things like aluminum cans and […] The post Recycling When It Was More Difficult appeared first on Custom Maid.

Recycling Used to Be a Pain in the Neck

Can you remember back to the days before Tidewater cities finally jumped on board the recycling bandwagon?  In the olden days (in the ’80s) if you were a forward thinking person who cared about the environment, you may have wanted to recycle things like aluminum cans and newspapers.  The best you could do was to tie up the newspapers into bundles with twine and drop them off at the few recycling areas sparsely distributed around the local municipalities.  I remember that Virginia beach had a series of white cans off Edwin Drive in Mount Trashmore.  The whole task of recycling was more labor intensive than most people cared to deal with although they knew that it was the right thing to do.

Custom Maid Had a BIG Idea!

So Custom Maid decided to make recycling easier for its clients.  We volunteered to pick up newspapers and aluminum cans to recycle.  We thought this would be a manageable amount of stuff.  Our plan was to take the newspapers and cans to a recycling center off Military Highway and sell it.  Then we would collect all the proceeds for the year and donate it in the name of our clients to The Joy Fund.  Sounds good, right?

The program was so popular that every week, yes EVERY week we were driving two vans full of papers and cans and receiving maybe $5 for our troubles.  We never expected such a ringing endorsement of our idea!  After a year, it became apparent that this project was more than we could handle.

Shame on Virginia Beach.  It was years before they came up with the old blue rectangular containers for curbside recycling and many more years until we all got the big blue cans.  I don’t know about you, but I fill my blue can to the top every time they come to collect.  I hope you make it your mission to recycle every little piece of paper and aluminum can you possibly can.

The schools get young kids into the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle.  My grandchildren came home from kindergarten all enthused about doing the right things for the environment.

While Custom Maid no longer picks up newspaper or cans, we still do a fabulous job of house cleaning.  Give us a call at 499-8568 for more information.

Request an Estimate

Editor’s Note:  We originally published this article in August 2014.  We have edited it for freshness, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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