It's Not Easy Being Green

At 10 a.m. on Monday morning I’ve already fished two yoghurt containers, a sandwich bag and half a newspaper from the garbage can in the office lunchroom. As I contemplate reaching into the congealed mess to pull out a suspiciously yellow milk carton, I wonder if I’ve gone too far.

It’s become my personal mission to see that no more recyclable material ends up in the office trash. As part of Alberta Venture’s mission to go green, we're placing bricks in toilet bowls, forming carpools and designating “heatless lunch” days. I’m on trash duty.

It started when we called in Garry Spotowski from the City of Edmonton’s waste management division to help reduce the amount of garbage we send to the landfill. Spotowski volunteered to perform a “waste audit” on our office, something he hasn’t done since the early 1990s when the Edmonton landfill was filling up fast and the city dispatched employees to help businesses reduce their trash output.

After taking a tour of our trash, he says that for the most part, we’re on the right track. We already have separate recycling bins for cardboard, plastic, bottles and cans. We have a box by the photocopier where we keep scrap paper that we use to make notepads. Everyone has a recycling bin at their desk.

But Spotowski says there’s still a lot we can do better, like using printer paper with a higher percentage of post-consumer recycled content. Spotowski also recommended a worm compost for our coffee grounds, apple cores and other organic material. No, it doesn’t smell. In fact, Spotowski says his compost resides in a nice wooden box in his living room, and no one can tell what it is.

If we can keep the ham sandwiches and paper towels to a minimum, the compost should turn into excellent fertilizer for the plants we’re going to buy that will improve the office air quality. Except that some people weren’t so keen about worms in the kitchen. As a compromise, now we have an ice cream bucket for organics that a co-worker has agreed to take home and empty into her home compost.

And here’s where I come in: to try to stop recyclables from going into the garbage, on Friday I collected individual garbage cans from under people’s desks, leaving one in every third office. The theory? If people have to get up to put something in the garbage, maybe they’ll stop and think about whether it can go in the recycling instead.

It wasn’t easy. Some people were really reluctant to part with their garbage. And when I arrived on Monday, I discovered that the weekend cleaning service had taken my neat pile of contraband trash cans and redistributed them back to every desk. So here’s the first lesson we learned: when going green, make sure everyone knows about it.

Lesson two? It can take some convincing to get everyone on the green band wagon. It helps if everyone knows why you want to take away their trash cans, and I hope we can distribute more information that will convince the skeptics to give the worms a chance. And maybe when the people who have refused to give up their garbage can see me, up to my elbows in orange peels and coffee grounds digging out their recyclables, they’ll come around. I’ll keep you posted.

Until then, I guess I’ll be dumpster diving. It’s like a wise frog puppet once said – it’s not easy being green.

Stay tuned for more tips from Garry Spotowski on how to reduce your production of trash in our August issue.