Recycling in the office?

I recently approached my boss on recycling at the swim school I work front desk at, and while he was interested in making that an official thing, it’ll be at least a little time before we can make it a reality. In the meantime, we do make a lot of paper and plastic waste.

We do small things like print things double-sided, reuse some of our plastic bags, and hold off on emptying trash if there’s only something like paper towels in them. What could be some other things we could do?

Thanks! [emoji170]

That's a wonderful move from you to do that! You're doing plenty already in recycling in the office. Perhaps you and your co-workers could reduce plastic bottles and instead bring your own bottles, start going digital instead of using papers and reuse the old office supplies. Hope this helps!

That is super exciting! I tried to get my boss to get recycling but it was a whole process and our city doesn't support it anymore (ie we'd have to pay A LOT and as a corporate they wouldn't pay for it).

But a swim school could really use that as a platform to help teach or even get in new business! Once I knew we weren't going to get recycling, I started doing some little things like bringing my own utensils so I wasn't using our disposable ones. But for office stuff, I laminated the papers that we were printing out every day and tossing and at least some of the stuff we were able to reuse, like attendance sheets and whatnot. I also made a little scrap paper basket so instead of using a ton of sticky notes or new sheets of paper to write a note we could use scraps.

Another option, and this might not work well, would be to just get a large bin or box and start putting your recycling in it and then once you get the recycling in however many weeks you can recycle it then. Or if you drive and are comfortable, you can take it to a recycle plant every week until you get it set up for pick up.

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Originally Posted by theMerFanc

That is super exciting! I tried to get my boss to get recycling but it was a whole process and our city doesn't support it anymore (ie we'd have to pay A LOT and as a corporate they wouldn't pay for it).

But a swim school could really use that as a platform to help teach or even get in new business! Once I knew we weren't going to get recycling, I started doing some little things like bringing my own utensils so I wasn't using our disposable ones. But for office stuff, I laminated the papers that we were printing out every day and tossing and at least some of the stuff we were able to reuse, like attendance sheets and whatnot. I also made a little scrap paper basket so instead of using a ton of sticky notes or new sheets of paper to write a note we could use scraps.

Another option, and this might not work well, would be to just get a large bin or box and start putting your recycling in it and then once you get the recycling in however many weeks you can recycle it then. Or if you drive and are comfortable, you can take it to a recycle plant every week until you get it set up for pick up.

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Yes! That's amazing what you're doing. The little things do make big changes with the environment. For me, I have stopped buying water bottles for years already, instead I bring my own water bottle from home and refill it outside it runs out.

Absolutely right decision