True Recycling

Hi Everyone,

My family and I just returned from a vacation at the Jersey shore. It doesn't sound right to say at the New Jersey shore. But I digress. We hadn't been there for a vacation in about 4-5 years. Although we spent most of our time in a quaint little town called Ocean Grove, which was founded in 1869. Ocean Grove is also the town directly south of Asbury Park.

The last time we saw Asbury Park it was a sorry, sorry sight, with more closed boardwalk stores then open ones. The heyday of Asbury Park seemed like a millennium ago. So we were quite pleasantly surprised to see a greatly improved boardwalk with lots of people and open stores. There was only one building that didn't have active tenants, but construction crews were working on the insides. A lot of money was spent, both by Asbury Park and the store owners, many of which sell some kind of food. But what really amazed me was that there were at least 20 shipping containers that had been converted into attractive stores/shops. Wow, what a concept that exudes the use of great common sense!

The shipping containers are the size of a trailer, the back end of the 18 wheeled tractor trailer. After they are unloaded from a ship, they are then lowered and secured onto a trailer that then gets driven to its delivery destination. But, due to the trade imbalance between the United States and China and other countries, there are more empty containers on this side of the trading route; since this country doesn't use that many to export our products. So the majority of the empty containers get returned to the ports and then sit there forever. Most likely never to be used again. I remember a segment on some news show, that aired many years ago, about the hundreds of thousands of empty shipping containers that were and still are sitting at ports all around our country and what to do with them. Well Asbury Park found a unique way of recycling them. The use of them is a win-win solution. It is obviously much less expensive to buy one of the containers and retrofit them versus building from scratch. And the containers are recycled into a useful product. Asbury Park's use of the containers was in the form of beach ticket sales offices and restrooms. As I said, the shops are attractive especially with colorful paint/designs and seemed to be very efficient. Some of the food shops even use two containers.

My hats off to Asbury Park and their forward thinking about recycling and using great common sense!

Til next week.