I am a green nazi. I love trees so much that after a meeting where I petitioned our sales team to electronically submit orders rather than printing them out, a co-worker put a post-it note that said “HUG ME” on the leaf of one of my office plants and set it on my desk for when I returned. I went so far during our office move to collect everyone’s scrap paper that they had initially thrown away and I made Jim lug a 3 feet tall stack of it a half mile from the car to to P&G to be recycled.
Therefore, people who waste paper frustrate me to no end. A guy in my office just printed out a 100+ page cell phone bill so he could get 14 pages of summary out of it. Why it’s not worth 5 extra minutes to go through, find those specific pages and print just them is beyond me. Instead, a ¼ of a ream of paper and X amount of ink was just wasted so he could manually pull them out of the stack and then throw the unneccessary sheets away. Salt in the wound I tell you. The recycling bin is 3 feet away from the trash can and 90% full of my papers since no one else seems to contribute to it.
Sometimes I feel my battle really is a lone, uphill one. No one else, at least in my office where the offences are hourly, seems to care. Somehow though this fact makes me feel like I need to care and conserve that much more to make up for each of the people who don’t.
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13 comments:
Makes me want to now find you a tree hugger shirt. :-) Just kidding. It's so important that people take responsiblity for their wasteful actions. Danny and I were comenting on how much trash we have been tossing into the dumpster lately. Too bad more people don't recyclye. We would if our apt complex had a program in place.
I agree totally, that is really frustrating.
I will say that I am much more conscious of energy "greeness" than I am material "greeness". I have replaced every single light bulb in the house with a flourescent one. (Hey, cut $75 a month off my power bill too....) I am extremely conscious about turning lights off, etc. I like temperatures set lower in winter or higher in summer to help conserve more.
I plant mostly native plants in my yard, so that I don't have to waste a lot of water keeping them alive. I don't use many chemicals other than Miracle Gro or plant food. I prefer to use minerals or other plants to keep bugs down. (Yes, you can do that....)
There are all sorts of things you can do, and I try to do what I can!
This would irritate me as well. I don't blame you on making Jim recycle all of that paper either - my apartment complex does not offer recycling, so I let mine stack up and take it to my mom's (thanks Trey for letting it pile up sometimes). As I've mentioned before, I also take my own cloth bags to the grocery store so as not to waste as much plastic - Trey used to call me a hippie until he realized that they were a lot easier to carry/load/unload than the plastic ones, too!
I love that Trey started to love the cloth bags! LOL!!!!
I gotta say, I'm black, compared to green in many areas. I throw lots of things away. I've used styrofom (GASP!) I even drive an SUV and want a BIGGER one. Sorry, I'm a polluter.
But what's hilarious to me is that I'll recycle paper and we use the recycle bin at home all the time.
I'm so inconsistent...shame on me.
A lot of people have trouble reading from a computer screen. Going through 100 pages on a computer screen could really be straining his eyes. Maybe printing off the paper was better for his eyesight than reading it from the screen.
I'd rather kill a tree than my eyesight. Trees are a renewable resource. Eyesight can't always be corrected.
Well I must say it took me a while to understand the whole recycling thing, but Carole, bless her heart, has made me a doer and believer. I am proud to say that our garbage situation every Friday morning always nets more recycled trash then our regular trash. It does cost us to recycle. It runs us aroud $7.00 a month, but I believe it is worth it. The recycle bin is still too small, but they allow us to place any extra in a white trash bag behind the bin they pick up every week. If it wasn't for Carole, I doubt I would have done it on my own. She has sold me on the idea. Now if we could just get rid of a few of the Golf Courses around hear that take up so much land, we might be able to build a few more homeless shelters, or provide housing for those that need a place to live, who could afford it, if housing developments were available. What a waste of land. I guess you can tell I don't play golf.
to my anonymous friend,
i understand your comments and completely agree with you on the eyesight thing. My preference for my co-worker woudl be not to read from the screen (even i like having a hard copy of things in front of me at times) but to scroll through, find the pertinent pages and print only those for future reference. That way you get the best of both worlds. Even if you print a dozen pages you're not sure you need it's still better than 5X the resources you would have used by printing the whole document.
Karen, maybe you should LEAVE CINCINNATI. *grin* And move someplace a little more eco-friendly....like OREGON? :)
And you know, you could always be like Gore..."do as I say, not as I do" and then turn around and donate money to a conservation agency.....
Karen,
Your blog moved me so much that I printed it out, made 1000 copies, and I'm gonna drop them off every doorstep until I run out!
hahaha. dale funny.
hey anonymous, what is it about throwing the excess papers in the trash instead of the recycling bin that saves one from eye strain?
i wish i were greener than i am...i recycle mine and others' papers when i can...i sometimes use my cloth bags (when i remember to put them back in my car). there's a lot i wish i could do, like recycle at home, but that's not an option in my apt; my lights get replaced when they burn out to those flourescant ones, but not to save money, my energy bill is already usually less than 20 bucks a month. and yes. i drive an suv. I'd say i don't drive it much but there's too much traffic and i don't feel safe enough riding my bike, plus i live in the suburbs so some drives are too far. i do a little, but there's more i could do...
I don't see how golf courses are a waste of land. If they weren't there, the place would probably be full of concrete. I figured eco-nuts would be happy that it's at least green and has trees and places for the frogs to be happy.
I'm investing in these new carbon credits. That way I can do all kinds of polluting things and not feel bad because somewhere I paid someone to plant a tree or something. It's sort of like how the pre-reformation Church sold indulgences.
I agree that he should at least recycle the paper after he views it. However, I don't think he is necessarily wasteful if he prints it out.
At my work, a co-worker tries to recycle paper by printing on the back of the used paper. (She takes the used paper out of the recycling bin.) I do not recommend that. Our copier repair guy is in at 2-3 times a week, because the used paper jams the copier. Not sure why it does that, but it does.
I recycle pop cans. I also reuse plastic grocery bags. They are just the right size for bathroom waste cans.
This might be too late, since the post is a little "old". But I couldn't imagine NOT recycling. Although Austria is not the eco-friendliest country, I must say that none of the people I know would dare to print so many pages for an outcome of 12 pages!
Also, we dare not put all our garbage in the same tin at the office/school/public places. We always recycle at least paper, plastic, cans and glass.
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