TOLEDO, Ohio -- Joan Schroeder works in a beauty salon in Toledo, Ohio, but she doesn't hesitate to get ugly if need be.Not with customers. No, she'll get tough with any co-workers she catches throwing away plastic bottles, paper or aluminum cans."I have no problem walking up to them and saying 'that's recyclable,' or I will stand right in front of them and pull it out of where they threw it in the trash and walk back and put it in the recycling," Schroeder says.As Kermit the Frog famously lamented, it's not easy being green.Call them eco-cops, tree huggers, green Nazis or just nags, people such as Schroeder are devout environmentalists who are spreading the gospel of recycling, by word and deed. They're the people who pick up bottles and cans from the side of the road, set up recycling programs at the office - and monitor co-workers' compliance - and pluck recyclables out of waste baskets. Some applaud their efforts, some wonder what all the fuss is about, some take longer to shed their bad habits than others. "A lot of the girls were on board right away. It just took somebody to put it together," Schroeder says. And someone to keep it going via what she calls "the occasional nudge."'"I can be a nag," agrees Yolanda Nunez, store coordinator at The Andersons' store in Toledo, where she established a recycling station in the employee lunchroom with boxes for paper, cans, cardboard and plastic."Our garbage is dramatically reduced, so the majority of people are embracing it, but there are some stragglers," Nunez says. Occasionally she'll have to put on plastic gloves and retrieve something from the recycling bin that hasn't been washed out, though. "I'm a stickler; if you're going to put it in there it has to be clean," she declares.For someone with a passion for recycling, the sight of recyclable materials in a wastebasket - clean or dirty - causes an almost physical reaction."I watched all the plastic being thrown out here, and it kind of makes you ill," says Schroeder.An echo comes from Sue McKinney, who set up a paper recycling system at Brondes Ford in Toledo, where she's in sales. "Looking at all the paper we threw away was disgusting." Bill Weaver takes a low-key approach to the greening of co-workers at the Correctional Treatment Facility in downtown Toledo. "If I come across as a policeman, it will just make people more resistant," says the clinical unit manager.Weaver, who introduced a recycling system in the building in May, 2007, through a Lucas County leadership program, supports the addition of a fourth 'R' to the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' mantra: 'rethink.''People don't think. They don't pay attention to the fact that so many things are recyclable, and the more aware we can make them, the better,' he says. He helps the process along with such strategies as moving a lunchroom recycling bin for cans and bottles into a more prominent location and putting up a sign explaining what can be recycled and why it's important to do so.Like other true believers, he's willing to reach into the garbage himself to take out something that belongs in the recycling bin - "pretty frequently if something's laying on top and not too messy,". Weaver says.That indirect approach is preferable to preaching for some of Earth's dearest friends. Mo Van Gunten of Liberty Center, Ohio, and Ted Stevens of South Toledo are good examples. Van Gunten takes empty detergent bottles out of wastebaskets at the Laundromat, and picks up pop bottles and cans that others have tossed along the road. One day she saw tabloid newspapers blowing off of a stack outside a restaurant; she scurried through the street picking them up.Stevens fills a 32-gallon container with recyclables every two weeks - some of his own, but mostly stuff that he finds in the trash at work and in the neighborhood."Although I'm 79 years old and it won't affect me in my lifetime, I try to explain to younger people that it does affect them in years to come," Stevens says.E-mail Ann Weber at aweber(at)theblade.com(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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