We were in the Shenandoah Valley (off Interstate 81) in July and the hotel manager told me they hadn’t lost any staff during the pandemic.
It makes me wonder how some areas have been more fortunate in keeping staff on board.
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DD’s retail company paid the staff they wanted to keep the entire time and tried to find something for them to do. They covered pay and health insurance for as long as they could for furloughed employees. Many came back as soon as they were called. Companies that tried to do their best tended to keep their employees.
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Not necessarily. My daughter just started working at a restaurant that is hiring. They are open limited hours and are hiring to be able to have a full schedule again. Right now it’s dinner 5 days a week only.
Went to one of our local Starbucks today. Haven’t been in months. Drive through only and hours reduced due to labor issues.
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I went to the redemption center outside our grocery store on Monday. The collection building was so jammed full I could barely shove my bags of cans and bottles in it. Then today I went to the reception kiosk inside the store to print out more bag tags and it was out of order (it was not working the last time I tried it, either). About that time, another customer came up and said there aren’t any redemption bags available for sale! What a mess.
Reading this is like reading a foreign language to me. I barely follow what you’re saying. I’m gathering it’s a form of recycling? We just put ours at the curb.
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I’m laughing because I am the same. Your guess is better than mine. I thought it was some kind of christian donation drop off. 
Edit - we have drop off places around town, but H has one at his school where we don’t even have to sort anything! It’s awesome.
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In some places, beverage bottles are required to have deposits to get people to return them for recycling.
Decades ago, many beverages came in thick glass bottles that could be washed and reused. Those had bottle deposits to get people to return them.
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We have bottle deposits, but we just return to stores that sell the product to get the deposit refund. Grocery stores have self service machines that you feed bottles & cans into one at a time.
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Ha I forgot that not all states have deposits on bottles. Here, you buy big green bags for a nominal cost, then fill them up with cans and bottles. You scan a card at a kiosk and it prints out tags you stick on the bags. You leave the bags at centers in or outside the grocery store. The employees credit your account with the returned deposit. You print out a slip that shows the credit, then the next time you shop that amount is deducted from your grocery bill.
We used to have to feed cans and bottles one by one into a machine, but it’s easier to just collect them in a bag and have someone else count them. At least it’s been easier until this week, ha.
Trash/recycling:
We have to buy special trash bags that aren’t cheap. Each town sets the price its residents have to pay. Then in a separate container (no bags required) we put recyclables. Paper, cans, most plastics, tin foil, etc. No sorting is required. One day a week, we take the trash bags and the recyclable container to the curb and a truck picks it all up at the same time. Last I heard, my turn was recycling about 48% of everything that’s disposed of.
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Yes. Thank you. I know what bottle deposits are.
Thanks for the explanations! wow that sounds complicated. I just put out the mixed bottles/plastic/cans one week, and paper the next. Put out trash twice a week, no special bags. Our trash and recycling costs come out of our taxes, so no additional payments. Recycling is pretty consistent here. Just the norm. They won’t take your garbage if they see any recyclables in it.
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So glad we just recycle 
our bottles and cans. 
Sadly, the markets for recycled material are often not great. As such, a lot of the separation that is done is to no avail, because some of what is separated out still goes to landfills. Glass is apparently one example. More generally, China has restricted its market substantially.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html
The markets will need to equilibrate and I’m not sure what the state of play is today.
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Reduce, reuse and recycle. Some people use recycle as a way to feel better about themselves when in reality their impact on the environment is significant and would be much less if they focussed more on reduce and reuse.
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We always take our recyclables to a local rescue mission where the job of many there is to sort it and drive it directly to recycling companies. That way I know it has its best chance of actually being recycled. Otherwise, it’s like @shawbridge posted and a lot does not, even when separated out to be.
We also buy recycled whenever we can. When we redid our pony pastures we purposely bought recycled plastic fencing. It was definitely expensive, but wow does it last. It can’t be painted, so no worries about “work” there (or graffiti). We had a large tree limb fall on it once bending it down almost to the ground. We took the limb off and by midday it was back to normal. We’ve had it up for probably 15-18 years now. Neighbors with wood fences have had to replace boards and paint during that time.
We also go out of our way to get Full Circle Toilet paper - or other recycled option if we can’t find that one. Wiping one’s butt seems to be a perfect use for recycled paper to us!
But overall, we buy recycled - and definitely reduce/reuse if possible. I’m not reusing TP though.
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We have a system similar to MaineLonghorn’s except that the centers we take the cans/bottles to are separate from the stores. Since Covid, the place you could just drop your green bag by swiping your card has been too full to use every time we have gone and the line to turn it in at a counter goes around the block. It’s frustrating because we have a .10 per can deposit and I’d like that money back. But not enough to stand in line for an hour with the unhoused folks. So we have taken to giving them to the local middle school who collect them once a month.
Our local scouts and our local Lions Club are both having can and bottle drives this week. Several locations…you just drop them off, and they deal with it. It’s a donation to these groups and we feel this is very worthwhile!
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totally agree–this was more a discussion of various regional procedures, I thought. But reduce and reuse definitely are the starting points.
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We could bring our bottles and cans back to the supermarket, but the machine that processes them is always disgustingly filthy and the room housing it smells of old sticky soda!
Instead we collect them in the garage and when we have a minivan-full, we bring them to a center that trains disabled people to sort them and send them for refund, letting them earn a wage. They give us the 5 cents per item back, and I understand that if they package them by manufacturer, they get 8 cents per item back, which is how they are able to run the center and pay the workers. I hope I explained this clearly—it’s a good thing that they do, don’t want it to sound exploitative!
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