Thermostat Recycling Corp. Is 24 on the 24th
I hope my suggestive headline for this month’s blog hits the mark as a repetitive attempt to remind everyone of two important dates.
Several years ago, we gained official recognition that Oct. 24 would serve as our annual Recycle Your Mercury Thermostat Day.
We created Recycle Your Mercury Thermostat Day as an outreach effort to entrench our message with the HVACR industry and beyond.
However, we also use this celebratory day to gain awareness with the general public. This annual occurrence, which we were able to include in Chase’s Calendar of Events (the standard for this type of special and unique days and events), was to remind consumers that a professional is the person best suited to conduct the change out. When we wear our marketing hat, the idea of a “national” day for recycling mercury thermostats was just odd enough to capture some media interest and a feeling of “I never thought about that” from the public.
It also serves as a highlight moment for our industry partners about their continued campaign to participate in our recycling program. We bolster this once-a-year effort with our six-month Banish Mercury Off the Planet (BMOP) competition. Given that we still receive containers from partners, the BMOP competition continues to be a successful promotion.
The key, aside from the semantics that we employ, is to firmly entrench ourselves in the effort to keep our environment safer.
This year our celebratory day coincides with TRC’s 24th year as a stewardship organization dedicated to the mission of collecting and properly recycling mercury-containing thermostats in the contiguous United States.
For the past 24 years, we have worked tirelessly toward recovering and properly disposing these thermostats.
What we do at TRC isn’t glamorous. (OK, if we did turn up that very last mercury-containing thermostat, it would be wonderfully exciting, if not quite glamorous.) That’s fine. As most of us know, life’s daily victories amount to small steps that result in some degree of achievement. For most, being the tortoise is more realistic and rewarding, I suspect, than being the hare.
We’re comfortable with that at TRC. While our mission is essentially singular in nature, we want to ensure that it remains the focus. And we’ll slowly, and yes, surely, work towards recycling those last remaining units – one thermostat success at a time.