A Lowe's employee recently took to Reddit to share one of the most frustrating parts of their job: having to constantly throw perfectly good plants into the trash compactor.
"I was asked to put trash in the compactor and when I saw this I was sooo sad…almost all these plants are perfectly fine NO DAMAGE and I had to chuck them into the garbage," the employee wrote in their post on the r/Lowes subreddit. "Literally hurt my soul. And none of these were returns just throwing them out cuz we got in a new shipment. Ig this kind of waste just comes with working retail but damn."
When organic matter, like food waste and plants, is sent to a landfill, it both takes up space and releases heat-trapping gases as it breaks down, contributing to the overheating of our planet. According to one study, expanding composting globally could avoid or capture 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide over the next 25 years.
Sending any organic matter to the landfill should be cause for consternation, especially when these plants were perfectly healthy. Even a less-than-perfect plant can be saved from such a fate, as one Lowe's shopper recently showed when they rescued a dying African violet for $1 off the Lowe's clearance rack and nursed it back to health.
"It gets me too how we just are shipped way too many plants and so many just go in the compactor and that we don't have a recycling program for the plastic and the actual plants," a commenter replied.
"LOWES working toward zero carbon emissions company. ALSO LOWES killing earth's natural things that eat carbon," another commenter pointed out. As that commenter said, Lowes has publicly announced a goal to reach net-zero emissions, but its deadline for doing so is in the distant future of 2050.
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