On an Earth Day like no other before it, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the air was cleaner than in decades and animals had begun to reclaim the streets in many urban areas across the globe.
And in Allen County, the weather may have been rainy and gloomy, but that didn’t stop Steve Strickler from collecting cardboard boxes from around town and loading them into the baler for recycling.
Clad in his bright red Kansas City Chiefs hoodie, he scooped up piece after piece and tossed them into the waiting jaws of the old contraption.
Strickler had bought the baling machine on the cheap, $250, as it had a broken cylinder.
“I’ll give it to you for scrap price,” the seller told him.
Strickler didn’t hesitate to accept.
“I’m a farmer,” he said, and was confident he could get it running, which he did with the help of a local welder.
Along with the tall blue contraption, the recycling room was filled to the brim with square totes full of cardboard, along with shredded paper and plastic, so much so that it was hard to walk from one end of the space to the other.
There are even materials from Woodson County along with those from Allen, not to mention multiple big green dumpsters from Moran.
Strickler and other volunteers from the local Rotary Club have been using facilities connected to Endurance Lift Solutions on the north end of Iola for about a year now, and have processed so many materials that Strickler is unsure of just how many tons have been moved.
Before that, Rotary had operated a paper drive for around 24 years.
Endurance is soon to close its Iola facility, which means that Rotarians may have to find a new site for recycling, “Plan B,” as Strickler called it, but they’re hoping they can continue to operate in the same space.
Sometimes Strickler has teams of fellow Iola recyclers to help him, including a few families, but he’s always looking for volunteers.
He was hoping that with school-closures due to the pandemic that he might have gotten some extra help, but so far it hasn’t worked out that way.
As of right now, the “rainy day crew” is mostly a one-man show.
