Absent Minded Recycling

From Melissa... our recycling maven

When Julie floated the idea about a What You Can Do Office Challenge I was super excited about participating. I feel that there are many areas where I could be better about helping the world t be a better place.

One thing that I think I could totally improve upon in my daily life is my recycling habits

When I lived in CA I always recycled everything because we had bins for bottles and cans and newspapers that would be picked up every week. After I moved to NYC I found that it was not as easy to recycle my products If your building doesn’t offer the bins or the pick up service it can be hard to save up all your recyclables and take them somewhere.

There are a few items that I am very good about recycling:

1. Beer Bottles. Not only do I save a lot of them and reuse the bottles for homebrewing, more often then not I have a pile of more then like a 100 bottles stacked up in my kitchen waiting for the next time I go to my local grocery store to recycle them. I get money back and then turn around and by my favorite types of beer. It is a win win situation.

2. Office Paper: Either at my house or in the office I try to reuse paper whenever possible. Be it writing a list or printing a non-important document. I have a little wire bin under my desk that holds my used paper. We also have one in the office that we try to always use.

Now on to the items I am not so good about recycling:

1. Newspapers: In NYC we have at least 2 different newspapers that are free that get handed out in the subway everyday I almost always read them in the morning when I am going to work. After I get out of the subway at 72nd street I almost always absentmindedly throw it on top of the other newspapers in the trash. Today, after I had thrown my paper into the trash, I actually picked it up off of the pile of trash and took it into the office where I will recycle it.

2. Plastic Bottles: When it was easy to throw any type of plastic bottle into my recycling bin I would always do this. But more often then not I have thrown away a shampoo bottle without thinking. These are definitely items that if I just take a little more time to think about I could bring them into the office and recycle them here in the building.

Having written this all done I feel like such a terrible person but I guess the first step to getting better is admitting that you might have a problem and focusing on what you can do better.

I think my next task will be to find out why the hell my building, which has over 5,000 people living in it, does not try to do a better job a recycling.

Onward and upward!