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Completely EF/Green Oblivious Co-worker
I'll start with this is a total whine because she is driving me crazy today...
Our company moved us into a brand spanking new LEED certified building last year and this is on top of how very actively EF/Green they are to begin with. We have recycling bins every where, switched to completely recycled supplies (for kitchen items), they encourage us to participate in any and every learning opportunity about how to improve and help, took away individual printers to discourage wasteful paper usage, and much more. So basically they make it clear that they expect us to also contribute to the efforts.
I have dual monitors so as not to have to print many things, seeing as everything we do is electronically filed. So what does co-irker do....print out a 3 page spreadsheet in full color on legal size heavy weight paper for the purpose of walking to my desk to show me two changes she made to the master list. Who cares...send me an email!! This the same woman who created a one page checklist for a process that a child could master and prints it out for every.single.client she speaks to, then prints the eleventy billion page email chain to attach to it for back up. I have asked her numerous times not to print everything out, that I have two screens and can reference multiple items at once and yet she continues.
I guess what bothers me the most is I know that as soon as I process these items for her and give the 'checklists' back they go straight into the shredder and/or recycling bin. Really, just don't print it in the first place. Ugh.
Sorry this is so long. This is just an annoyance that I can not seem to get over...mostly because she does it every day.
Re: Completely EF/Green Oblivious Co-worker
well... at least it gets recycled after?
We print a lot of paper at work. I hate it, but its hard to avoid. We have a pretty paper-centric system here. We all use the other side for scratch paper, and then recycle it, but still, its a lot of paper.
Me too. A lot of people have dual monitors, but I (and most of the people with whom I work closely) don't. I try really hard not to print if I don't need to, but so much of it is unavoidable.
Since most of what I print is proprietary information, it has to go into the shredder bins (and I pray it gets recycled by the shredding company!). I only hang onto non-sensitive pages (like when a spreadsheet prints an extra page with blank cells...grrr!) for scratch paper.
I take home the shredded and put it in my compost.
I'm really struggling hard not to start asking people for their food waste. But that's just gross.
Still, our building has a huge daycare, and a food company, and then a few smaller companies. The food waste from this building alone must add up so much! I can't think about it.
I would totally do that, but we're talking huge 42" tall locked bins with a slot in the top to slide your papers in, and then a truck comes and dumps the contents into a big shredder. I just looked at the company's website, and it appears that they recycle it (yay!).
My co-worker and I were just talking the other day about how if we thought about it too much, it would drive us crazy. Like how they tell us to put all recycling and trash in co-mingled bins and that the recycling gets sorted out off-site. Does it really? We have no way of knowing, and it drives us nuts! It feels so wrong to throw something that I know is recyclable into a "trash" can.
We use a lot of paper at work. Every page you print also prints with a cover sheet saying who printed it because so many people use the same printer and also for privacy - we print stuff with personal information on it sometimes. The one good thing is that the cover sheets go into certain recycle bins and one of the cleaners comes around every couple days to collect the paper and then the sheets are cut up and stapled together and people grab them and use them as scrap paper - so at least it is getting reused I guess.
However anything with the slightest little bit of info on it has to go into special locked bins for security and then those are picked up every so often and shredded and discarded. I totally get why this is needed and appreciate the security factor but I hate seeing how many things people print - some people print every item they work on and don't bother to skip or delete out blank pages or pages they don't need. But I do realize that often times we need a lot of info to do our job and you have to be a higher up to get dual monitors - I think that would help a lot of the paper waste issue though. Oh well.
All of that is to say that I totally understand where you are coming from
Yeah, in office settings using paper is hard to avoid, but you don't have to waste it like your co-worker. That would drive me nuts too. I work for an environmental consulting firm, and we are so.not.green it's not funny. We have sleeves of styrafoam (
) cups above our water cooler, disposable plates and cutlery, we make hardcopies of every.single document that goes out even though they're all electronic too, and our building doesn't recycle so I bring the recycling home with me. It's terrible and makes me so 
. And our company has an "environmental stewardship" division who sends out these cutesy lists of green things you can do at home, but the office (where we all spend the majority of our waking hours) isn't green at all.
And I have totally been labeled as the crazy green person. I'm constantly chided for bringing home the recycling, eating leftovers in reusable containers, and using scrap paper instead of the bound perforated sheets.
I absolutely understand that offices have to use paper, I just can't stand when co-workers are needlessly wasteful.
I also get the side from coworkers for being more green, or hippie as they call it, just from the slight changes I have made in my life to be more ef. But that is mostly in my unit. This particular office for our company is a hub for the US so we have Climate Change and Environmental Management units housed here with us and I have watched (on numerous occasions) people go into the trash bins in the lunch room to retrieve recyclable containers that they watched someone else throw away.
For the most part I could not ask for a better environment to work in as far as my ef beliefs go as they are very supportive as a company (especially living in the land of oil loving, urban sprawl), but some peoples complete unwillingness to do anything gets under my skin.
TTC since 2007
6 IUIs, 3 IVFs, and 2 m/c :< PCOS, Blood Clotting Disorder & MFI
IVF #2 Aug 2011 is a BFN:<
IVF #3 March 2012 is a BFN
Not sure what to do now. Sad and lost.