Green Team goes through the trash

Employees volunteer to do the dirty work of recycling for hospital

Jessica Johnson
The Post and Courier

East Cooper Regional Medical Center's Green Team, (from left) Christie Cox, Delores Minnix, Connie Mahan and Joe Papp, empty recycling bins in the hospital cafeteria.

Recycling can be a pain.

Members of the East Cooper Regional Medical Center Green Team empty bins of bottles and cans, liquid sloshing in bags. Before it's properly disposed of, it sometimes seeps out into team members' trunks.

Mount Pleasant's curbside recycling program isn't available to big businesses such as the hospital, the town's largest employer. So employees volunteer to do the dirty work.

Delores Minnix, payroll coordinator, spearheaded the Green Team after some new employees last spring asked, "Do we not recycle here?"

Minnix and 19 others began collecting recyclable materials from their departments and delivering them to a recycling collection point on Earth Day, April 22.

Team members sometimes watch over fellow co-workers reminding them that what they are about to throw out is actually recyclable.

"Most of the time, they don't know," Minnix said.

Christie Cox, who works in the information systems department, has gone through garbage cans once taking recyclables out and leaving a note on the offender's desk.

"They know they have to, otherwise the recycling Nazis will get them," Cox joked.

Recycling tips are circulated in the hospital's Pulse newsletter.

For the most part, the program has been well-received and awareness has sparked new ideas. As a group collected a bag of recyclables in a cafeteria recently, Kathleen Golka, who works in the women's services department, suggested holding a scrub swap. Employee's closets are filled with uniform scrubs.

Golka said people could bring in the uniforms they are sick of or don't fit quite right on a payday, trade them and send the rest to a church.

Next, the team will encourage people to bring in their own drinking glasses and pass out maps to hospital drinking fountains and water coolers.

Conservation efforts will continue when the hospital moves into its new structure on the same site sometime in 2010. The current hospital will be reused by another medical facility. Pam Schwacke, marketing and public relations director, said the hospital first looked into adding on to the 22-year-old care center, but the new building codes strengthened for hurricanes and earthquakes made an addition to the two-story building cost prohibitive.

Once in the new building, the Green Team hopes to push for it to become a stop on a CARTA route, encouraging employees to take the bus. The nearest stop has no shelter.

Schwacke said it's too soon to tell how much money the recycling volunteers save the hospital.

Less material is going into the trash, which they pay to dump. But the hospital also contracts with a company to shred private documents.

Saving money wasn't the reason Minnix led the team.

"I have a 16-year-old son," she said. "I would like for him to enjoy the Earth and all it has to offer when he gets older, too."

Reach Jessica Johnson at 937-5921 or jjohnson@postandcourier.com.