Packed it in? Pack it out!

Guest blogger series: Crawling Toward Sustainability

This is the eleventh in a series of guest blog posts in which Emma will track the progress of her office in becoming more sustainable. Next up, renovating the basement.

You may have figured out by now that we recycle a great deal of paper at Bruce Carscadden Architect. What we tend to recycle less of, however, is everything else.

Glass, plastic and metal container recycling for a commercial building is not provided by the City of Vancouver, and can be quite expensive.

With only 10 of us in the office, we don’t really produce enough garbage and recyclables to necessitate using costly pick-up services (unlike all the damn paper). Of course, we’re nowhere near being a zero-waste office. We certainly have rubbish we have to deal with, but we average about one big bag per week plus our recycling.

Private collection services are geared towards much larger offices that make enough waste to fill huge bins. So we’re getting a bit creative with ways to recycle as much as we can and reduce the amount of garbage we produce even further.


 

Binners important to waste management in Vancouver

Recyclables with deposits are easy to get rid of. Many members of the community—in the Downtown Eastside and across the city—generate some income by returning bottles and pop cans to places like United We Can for which they get a few cents per container in exchange.

Returning bottles for the deposit is a socially, environmentally and economically sustainable practice, so it’s pretty cool that the City of Vancouver recognizes this—they’ll be hiring binners to collect bottles during the Olympics.

But what about everything else—aluminum cans, yogurt containers and all that plastic that seems to be just a part of daily life? Without municipal or private pick-up, these run a real risk of ending up in the trash—and sometimes do, which is terribly unsustainable of us. So what to do? Well, we can always pack it all out.


 

Applying a camping ethic to office waste reduction

Consider the office a campground of sorts. Remember “take only pictures, leave only footprints?” No need to tread so gingerly at the office, but why not take containers back home again? We all have municipal recycling pick-up at our homes, and nothing is preventing us from taking that yogurt cup home and dumping it in our own blue bin.

It’s an astoundingly simple solution to dealing with the recycling at the office—and at next to no cost!—but the trick will be actually getting everyone to follow through. It is way too easy to forget things and let them pile up at the office, which is when they end up in the trash!

I just have to think of way to get the rest of the office on board without resorting to posting a sign in the kitchen that will end up on PassiveAggressiveNotes.com.