CHEERS to employees at the new Subway on Route 3 in Plattsburgh who helped search every inch of the store and parking lot when a Press-Republican employee lost her passport last week. That afternoon, the workers even went through each piece of trash to make sure it hadn’t been picked up and tossed into a garbage can by mistake. Losing an important document can make a person feel pretty helpless, but having extra helping hands to assist with the search certainly eases a frantic situation. While the Subway crew did not meet with success, we are happy to also CHEER Bill Burch , who found the passport in the Subway parking lot shortly after the owner lost it. He thought the document looked pretty important, so he picked it up and went back into the store to try to find her. He later tracked her down and set up a time to return the passport. A frustrating situation was turned around thanks to a number of kind people in the North Country who did the right thing. They should be applauded.
JEERS to hotels that don’t go as far as they can go to encourage recycling. Truly good recycling initiatives were seen recently in a Marriott hotel in the Burlington area. There, management had installed containers in each room to encourage maximum recycling, minimum trashing. Here’s a list of the items this hotel was inviting guests to recycle: glass, plastic, metal, bottles, can, boxboard, plastic packaging, tubs and jugs. The hotel then would take care of seeing that the items were delivered to recyclers. Now, that is an active recycling effort. In contrast, passive recycling might include putting one container in the lobby in which cans or bottles can @Editorial Drop Cap:be placed, if lodgers are of a mind to do it. We know, we know – Vermont has a reputation as a state that goes all out with “green” concepts. But practices such as the one we saw remind us that green is good, and not in just the Green Mountain State. Our Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties have each had serious issues, over the past decade or two, with trash disposal. Establishing landfills is a costly process, and keeping up with the flood of garbage, supplemented by the increasing consumption of fast foods, nonreturnable beverages and other materials that find their way into the rubbish bins, is costly. But it’s far more than economics that we’re dealing with here. As most Vermonters know — and we should, too — the less material we have to bury in Mother Earth the better for generations to come. We urge every hotel to learn from the example from across the lake: Make recycling easy, accessible and desirable. It’s good for all of us and great for our children and grandchildren – and theirs.
— If you have a Cheers and Jeers suggestion that you want the Editorial Board to consider, email it to Editor Lois Clermont at letters@pressrepublican.com.
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