What could be worse than finding a needle in a haystack? Finding jingling keys in a trash pile.
Lincoln Transportation and Utilities (LTU) posted to social media on Friday, showing a heart warming effort from Lincoln’s Solid Waste Management team, who rummaged through piles of trash to find a pair of keys for a Lincoln resident.
KLIN News spoke with the team member who spotted the keys Shay Flowerday, an Environmental Health Educator with LTU. She told us what sent her, and her teammates Terry and Robert, riffling through piles of garbage.
“A woman was at one of our recycling sites, and accidentally threw her keys in with her plastic. She called the next day saying, ‘I know this is a long shot, but is there anything you could do to help me?'”
Flowerday was up for the challenge, and had a plan.
“We asked her for a time frame, and we looked on our site-camera and found her and her car. We could see the keys in her hand, putting her plastics into a bag, and she just tossed the keys in with them,” Flowerday recalled, “Seeing exactly what bin they went into was very important. If not for that, there honestly would have been no way to know.”
Once the key-rescue-team located the bin, “Me and my supervisor went to the site immediately to make sure the specific bin hadn’t been pulled yet. It hadn’t, and it was full. So we called Robert and Terry to move the bin over to Firstar Fiber recycle center. They cleared an area on their floor for us to dump it,” said Flowerday.
With trash scattering the recycle center floor, the search was on.
Flowerday said the search-effort was faster than expected, “It was honestly pretty quick. We saw it was in a yellow bag, and we just slowly tipped all the plastics out. There were only a couple yellow bags, we jumped as soon as we saw it.”
“It felt pretty good,” said Flowerday when complemented on this act of kindness.
And the woman — who likely thought her keys were a lost cause — her reaction when LTU called with the good news?
“When she came, she was almost in tears,” said Flowerday, “She was saying how great we were, she wanted to speak with our supervisors, write to the Mayor, and just make sure everyone knew how much she appreciated it.”
Well deserved recognition.
Flowerday even shared a thank you to the community, following the successful search, “To the public: thanks for keeping your recyclables clean! Digging through dumped plastics, you might not expect it to be so clean, but people do a really good job of rinsing out their recyclables,” she said warmly, “It was nice to not be digging through any icky-ness.”
LTU captured the moment they found the keys on video, which can be viewed below.
When keys play hide & seek in a recycling plastics bin, our Solid Waste Management team steps in! 🔑
Terry, Robert & Shay worked their magic to recover a set of keys lost at a collection site yesterday. Big thanks to Firstar Fiber for their support in making this happen! 👏 pic.twitter.com/CbfGxLrIbC
— Lincoln Transportation and Utilities (LTU) (@LTULNK) January 3, 2024