This survey highlights a lot of my more negative feelings about treehugger. It is one thing to consume expensive, "less bad" items. I would like to challenge every person that does not have a recycling program of any sort at their workplace to start one! When I started working, NO ONE recycled, and many people responded negatively when I simply recycled my own personal paper. Now, everyone accepts it and most people (some exceptions) participate. It took a while. If you work at a particularly large office or other company, there may be some financial incentive to recycle - look for buyers of office paper or aluminum in your area (note - you probably need A LOT of paper to make this worth your $$$ while). Even if you just take recyclable products home once a week for curbside pickup, start something!

We even Compost all food scraps at our office..

In Seattle, you can't *not* recycle. However, what you can recycle is quite limited. Though it's the same collection company, at home I can recycle glass and even steel, but they won't pick up either of these at work.

The biggest pet peeve I have is that we have recycling bins next to every trash can at work, and people STILL put their cans and plastic bottles in the trash. I just don't understand it.

I find it amazing how many companies do not recycle, because the municipalities in the charge for recycling for businesses, but not for residents. Take the City of Denver. You can recycle at home, but not at work, thus pound after pound of glass, plastic and aluminum from restaurants & other businesses go straight to the dump. There are a few companies that will pick up paper, but your business must have the incentive to find them and then carry through with the recycling. We did it at my old job (at a hotel), and even the head housekeeper eventually saw the light and realized how recycling newspaper and more eased her load when it came to trash removal.

This is a sore point for me. Many years ago, we started recycling and I dilligently sorted my organics from my recycleables from my general waste. The recyleables were picked up by the city, the organics went to my own personal compost pile, and the remainder went to the landfill. I did this for about five years before I learned that the city stopped recycling because it was too expensive. They still operated the fleet of recycling trucks because they were legally required to under contract with the local firm, but the waste ended up in a special corner of the landfill anyway. It turns out that this was common among many large municipalities to quietly start transshiping recycleables to the landfill to save a few bucks. Now the paid trash service I usu automatically sorts the bulk trash I discard, and recycles what can be.

not at the office but at school where it would be so easy and useful with all the paper we use all the time

When I worked at at the corporate HQ of a big company it was like pulling teeth to get people to take their water bottles all the way across the room (possibly 100 feet!) to recycle them. The issue of buying individual bottles of water even though an ice and water machine with good tasting water was even easier to get to than the Coke machine seemed like too much to lay down on them.

Now I work at a recycling company where we joke that not recycling is grounds for termination. Actually, I don't even think it's a joke.

My advice to people working at medium to large places is to find the person that pays the garbage bill, either in admin or facilities management or wherever, and give them an idea of what they'd save in their garbage bill. Touting the environmental benefits is fine and good, but in my experience a lot of people in these positions don't give a shit about that end of it and as we all know businesses just aren't held accountable for the majority of the waste they generate. Presenting decision makers with recycling options or contacts would help, or anything else you can think of to make it easier on them.

i use greendisk'spack-it service to recycle my cdr's and inkjet cartridges etc. for my home office. they also have services for larger organizations.

I work at one of the offices for one of the largest communications companies in Canada. It disgusts me to know that we have no recycling program in place. In my small department of about 20, we must go through at least 1500 sheets of photocopies and prints bi weekly and all of that goes straight into the garbage.

On top of all this, folks seem to have no problems simply throwing their pop cans and bottles into the trash cans.

I'm wondering if anyone provide links to sites that can gives examples of how much recycling can save at the office, in addition to the environmental benefits it offers. This would be essential in being able to bring up this issue with facilities.

I posted the first comment. To follow-up, the recycling program we have exists because I take recycling home for curbside pickup. In large businesses, this is not such a practical method - but in large businesses, you are much more likely to generate enough paper (aluminum, etc.) for a recycling company to purchase. If your company does not produce enough for this to be financially worthwhile, you may be able to partner up with nearby companies and have a local pickup.

The lack of awareness in most business settings is alarming. I work in a community hospital, and would like to initiate an awareness campaign. I thought we could save money if employees use coffee cups from home as opposed to the styrofoam that is routinely used. I think this action would make a big difference, but how to get people to participate???? Any other suggestions would be appreciated...

I work for an international software company that is based in Germany, one of the greener countries in the world. Property management at our US HQ will NOT allow me to start my own aluminum and plastic recycling program. All I want to do is put a bin out for others to put their recycling in, so that I can take it home and recycle it my self. They say they are in the midst of "testing" their own program, but they have no details, no timeframe, and no promises.
I have gone to Facilities, HR, and my superiors to no avail, other than to be warned to stop using company time to pursue this issue. I received a veiled threat about my job security from HR.
Any ideas from folks out there? My coworkers all agree with me, but won't take a stand to support me, and most only vaguely care.