The sheltered workshop as a community recycling center.

ANY SHELTERED WORKSHOPS do not provide actual work. Sheltered workshops often exist to provide a place for handicapped individuals to spend their day engaging in arts and crafts activities that are unsalable. Many sheltered workshops have greenhouses that grow and sell plants and herbs for little more than it costs to buy seed. Most workshops do business on a contract by contract basis where a contract is awarded to the workshop to produce a product for a limited period of time. When a contract of this type is awarded to a workshop, most of the workers are pulled from their regular jobs to work on the contract until it is finished. This is an extremely inefficient way to run a business and a haphazard means of providing training to sheltered workers. Brown, Wright, and Hitchings* have provided somehelpful guidelines for sheltered workshops when procuring work contracts. Those sheltered workshops administered by persons possessing sufficient skills in marketing and business administration to run a workshop in a lucrative manner are fortunate. One of the basic rules of marketing is that a business must produce a product that the public will buy and not produce a product and hope that the public will buy it. This necessitates the need for research into market areas prior to manufacturing a product or providing a service. Typically, the administrator must make a choice as to whether to run a lucrative business or to provide education and training to the workers with state and federal subsidies. Rarely are the two functions done simultaneously. Ideally, the production of a product or service by sheltered workers would also provide training for workers. The need exists for an everpresent, readily accessible market for the services of a sheltered workshop. This type of market for services could be obtained through waste recycling. Recyclable wastes such as paper, metal, and glass are always available, and waste recycling could provide a marketable service for sheltered workshop employees while providing useful training. These services would make the community more aware of the sheltered workshop as a viable