Others' environmental awareness

[wind in the trees]

I have been pondering this and wondered how others would approach the lack on environmental awareness of people with whom you work. I share an office with two other people and a recycling bin. The place I work seems to have excellent facilities for recycling, having a box for placing paper, card, cans, plastic bottles etc., which is regularly emptied, in every office. However, my colleagues don't use it! They place their empties in the bin. I find this unbelievable. Not only this, but one of them (who, I might add, is old enough to know better...) most evenings leaves her computer on all night, simply because it is slow to start up in the mornings. I did once enquire as to why she didn't turn her computer off and that was the reason she gave, and for a short time she did start turning it off, presumably because she felt embarrassed. However, now it remains on most nights.

Whilst I think what they are doing is outrageously thoughtless, I do not beleive it is my place to tell them what to do. I also don't want to create bad feeling as I have to continue to work with these people (for a few months only).

How would others approach this?

Look forward to your comments

[Donata]

They know the recycle bin is there and what it is for, so I don't see how you can actually address it to them without sounding preachy and superior, and causing ill will. It's unlikely this would make a difference in recycling.

If it bothers you enough you could stay a few min. after everyone leaves and sort through their wastebaskets and place recyclables in the recycle bin. Of course if anyone sees you doing this it might be hard to explain.

Or simply set an example without comment and ignore what they do.

Donata

[Susanne]

Oh can I understand! I work in an operating room where there is a huge amount of packaging both plastic & paper. When I first started working there everyone was throwing all of it away which was driving me crazy.
I started out with small things and as time went by worked my way up until after my cases I will sometimes have a large bag of recyclables to bring out. As one of my most hard to convince colleagues teases "saving the world one plastic bottle at a time" to which I say yes indeed & proud of it!
The best part of it is that even though it took a while most everyone has started to save recyclables now. Although I still unabashedly pull things out of the trash (as long as they're clean that is, considering where I work) when I see someone throw a recyclable in.
Stick with it, lead by example & be proud of your effort. They'll catch on eventually & if not there is always trash picking
Now I just need to get everyone to turn off the lights & radios at the end of the day.....

[Karl]

That must be so frustrating - it only takes a second to use one bin over another.
I work at a printers and luckily everyone has a separate bin for recyclable paper, and all of us use them. I am frustrated by the cartridges and disposable rollers which 'cannot' be recycled going to landfill. But short of us stockpiling them there isn't much I can think of!

My great grandfather used to chuck all his rubbish overboard of his boat, his reasoning being "Ducks'll eat it!" - even tin cans. Sometimes I wonder how humanity has survived this far...

[Ade Sundog]

This is something that used to really annoy me, but i found over the years that it was just easier to do other peoples
recycling for them , with even mentioning it, i even bring things home , or put them in the recycling bins on the
way home. (Or rather did , when i had a job haha).

You should see what happens on building sites , evrything just goes into one skip. (Sometimes there is one for
wood and one for metal) , but on the whole , it's shameful.

[Karl]

You just wait, maybe fifty years, maybe two hundred, we'll all be sorting through the mountains of land-fill. Most likely it'll be to scavenge for certain materials which will become ultra rare, perhaps it'll be just to make room for more houses, but for whatever reason I can tell it's on the cards.

[DJ Droood]

You just wait, maybe fifty years, maybe two hundred, we'll all be sorting through the mountains of land-fill. Most likely it'll be to scavenge for certain materials which will become ultra rare, perhaps it'll be just to make room for more houses, but for whatever reason I can tell it's on the cards.

Absolutely...garbage dumps and abandoned high-rises will be the mines of the future...already are in some areas of the world.

[mark the compost elf]

I think it's a problem that is faced by a lot of us - people just don't care enough, but that is probably because they aren't aware enough to make tyhe links that they need to. If you don't want to nag them (i'd be tempted to be scathing) then why not suggest that your office celebrates world earth day (22-04-12) and build in to it a series of educational emails that are short and snappy and tell the problems associated with different environmental issues, send one an hour cand if you get moaned at, then just say that it's something you believe in and that it upsets you when they do the wrong thing - being honest is often the biggest motivator.

If you think you might face being mocked for this, then i would take the mockery with a pinch of salt - after all, what is a belief that cannot stand up to a few jibes or questions.

[DJ Droood]

Why would anyone care when the message we consume daily, through the media and resulting "water cooler" debate, is that consumption drives the economy and creates jobs, there is plenty of clean, cheap energy, humans aren't impacting the environment, this 11° Celsius December morning is just part of a natural "cycle", and besides, science is just a bunch of "theories" anyway....(and as long as we remember to recycle, we are on the right side of this thing)?

I mean, I like to recycle and think it is rude and thoughtless not to, but at the this point, it is a bit like shrilling at people to tidy their cabins before they make an orderly evacuation to the lifeboats.

[Lily]

You know, even people who care make uninformed choices.

e.g. the part-time vegetarian who then goes to eat unsustainable fish....

[wind in the trees]

Thanks so much for all of your posts on this. I guess it comes down to the sort of personality you are as to how you deal with this. It's tricky. I like to get on with people, not get their backs up. But at the same time, I hate the "it's not my problem" attitude. That's the last thing that I see Druidry standing for. I also think my colleagues should face up to what they are (or rather aren't ) doing. So I think I am going to have to be creative. Maybe next time I see them put something recyclable in the bin I may just say "oh *we* can recycle that you know, it says so on the bin...".

And what you say is right Lily, even those who are trying make bad choices at times. But as long as we keep consciously trying to be more aware of the impact our actions have on the planet, it's good to be a good thing, even if we do get it wrong sometimes....

[Lily]

oh -p.s. can you fathom trying to "heal the earth" using crystals which were strip-mined from the rainforest.... just a last point in case.

[Charlene]

My take on this is that we need to act, and each action we take to reduce, reuse, and recycle (mostly the first two) will make changes. I do not do bottled water...i filter my own and put into the fridge. The only time I want to see bottled is for a disaster relief, and even then. I am consciously looking at stuff, consumerism stuff, and each time I buy, I ask about its future.....

my big bug aboo is plastic...so petroleum based, worse than fuels in some ways...and everywhere. There is a student in Canada that discovered a bacteria that will decompose styrofoam....imagine that....but I still....worry about all kinds of garbage. Metal recyclers make good money from autos and the like, but there is so much plastic still in the old cars.....

Pipelines are big news here...Enbridges from the tar sands to the west coast to access the Chinese market. The ports on the west are seismically active....Pacific Rim....so to me, transporting stuff through all that, plus the pipelines go through marsh and freshwater salmon spawning rivers.....crazy....1400 km of pipeline....for what? The Government here is calling environmentalists "enemies of the state" and worse....saying that foreign interests are behind the ecomovement protests. Nonesense....not like Enbridge is a Canadian company (so much of the energy resource companies are not owned by Canadians....ha).

[katie bridgewater]

It's a shame you don't say where you are on your profile Charlene as the US is so big. But if you are anywhere near La Plata, Missouri, you might like to look up the Possibility Allaince Community (no web presence) started by one of the most inspirational couples (Ethan & Sarah) I have ever had the pleasure to meet. They are off grid, perto chemical free and as plastic free as possible and only eat food from within a 200mile radius. They concentrate less on the big picture of craziness and more on getting on with being less crazy. You'd probably like them!