| Why
is paper recycling such a challenge? The answers have to do
with the natural reluctance of people to change habits, with
the designed-to-fail nature of many programs, and with the
assumption of managers that such programs will run themselves.
None of which bodes well for efforts to move toward recycling
other waste materials—not to mention making even more
substantive changes to reduce workplace eco-footprints.
If your organization isn't recycling, it's
long past time to begin. As a rule of thumb, a typical office
generates about 1.5 pounds of waste paper per employee each
workday. (Financial businesses generate more than two pounds.)
That's roughly 350 pounds per employee a year—or
a total of about 2.5 tons for a small, 15-person office. You
can do the math based on your own company's size.
In theory, paper recycling should be pretty
easy. Think of it as your organization's snail-mail delivery
service, but in reverse. Typically, mail arrives from the
post office to a central mail room, where it is sorted by
building, floor, or department—with luck, ultimately
ending up on the right desk.
Paper recycling goes in the opposite direction:
it typically begins on desktops and ends up at a central location
(perhaps not far from the mail room), where it is picked up
by a recycling firm.
Of course, it's not quite that simple. A successful
program requires that bins be accessible and well marked,
that people understand what to do and are reminded of it constantly,
and that all players—employees, recycling coordinators,
custodial staff, facilities managers, collection companies,
and others—are reading off the same (recycled) page.
An effective program can pay for itself,
and then some, by collecting and separating paper that has
resale value in the waste-paper marketplace. Usually, that's
clean white paper -- the kind used for letterheads, photocopying,
plain-paper faxing, memos, reports, and the like.
The more contaminants in a batch—off-white
paper, glues, staples, and other non-paper items—the
less valuable it will be. (That doesn't mean you can't throw
every scrap of paper or cardboard item into a single bin.
It's just that its value will be considerably less, potentially
making recycling a cost instead of a revenue source.)
More often than not, successful recycling
takes equal parts creativity, determination, and TLC. For
example, at Coca-Cola's headquarters in Atlanta, employees
can bring recyclables from home to put into company bins.
That gets them thinking about recycling at
home as well as at work—and gets them to learn where
the bins are. Coke is among many companies that donate proceeds
from recycling to worthy causes in employees' names. That
helps motivate people, who know the fruits of their labors
are going to a good cause.
Waste
container | Dumpster
| Collapsable
Trash Cans |
Recycle
Different Types of Plastic
|
Recycling
in Phoenix |
Recycling
paper |
How
to recycle paper?
|
