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Luckily for me, my family is very supportive of the green initiative.  But it’s not just in our home that we implement some environmentally friendly tools; my mom has done her part to extend green living to the world. She is the director of facilities for a major university’s medical center and she has spent much time and energy over the past year to help them become more neighborly to our wonderful world.

But it’s not always easy. One day last year, her company was renovating a building and thus they were tearing out a bunch of walls and such. She proposed a contract with the general contractor before beginning the renovation that all the materials that they were taking down that could be recycled would be and also that they had to tell her how they were dealing with said recycling and where they were taking the materials. After they stopped laughing, they came back and told her that it would cost a little over 1 dollar per square foot to recycle the materials. For her 75,000 square foot space, this would bring the cost up to around $80,000. Now, while her company’s budget is quite large, that seemed just too excessive to validate, so she did some further research.

So, she went out and started talking to friends and co-workers who were active in the recycling initiative and asked for their help. She still couldn’t find just one, convenient, affordable company to  get it all done, so she had to split up the tasks. She found somebody to recycle the lights for her for $6,000 instead of $40,000. She also found somebody to recycle the carpet for free, rather than $20,000. Carpet, you may or may not know, can be turned into all sorts of things.

She was not able to recycle the ceiling tile because in the era that the building was constructed, the ceiling tiles had foil backing. At the time of the renovation, they had not yet come out with a machine that could break the tiles down and recycle them. Fortunately, they have since come out with such a tool.

I like to think of living green as living naturally. But, when the big corporations fight you at every step when you’re trying to make a difference in the planet, the challenges become frustrating. Sometimes, my mom would come home and just say “is it even worth it?” Luckily, she persevered, and now, we like to think, the world is a bit better off than it would have been if she had just given up.