[Merged] Office people who toss everything in the garbage

I work at a place right now temporarily where there are no blue bins, the whole unit has ONE bin for paper, that's all. So everywhere they're tossing cans, newspapers, and their mail right in the garbage bin without a second thought. It's really disgusting, I've brought it up casually to people and their response is "yeah haha we're bad here". I think that's such a ****ed up attitude.

Shoppers Drug Mart as a company does not recycle. All the boxes, all the flyers (on a weekly basis) that are left over or aren't crisp/new any longer get thrown out every week ...
Hundreds of flyers per store, every week, over 1,000 stores. You figure out how much that is, on a flyer level alone.

I heard that most businesses contract out their garbage collections, so perhaps this is done to save money.

If commercial garbage collection is done by the city, its amazing they still do this. The city (at least Toronto) even makes it easier for people to recycle by allowing metals, papers and plastics in one bin. The sorting gets done later.

Or you could work at a place like i do....put forth the effort of separating all your garbage and make sure it goes to its proper location to be recycled only to watch the cleaners come in and dump it all into the same bin to go to the compactor where nothing gets recycled.....

the only problem is that a lot of buildings dont support recycling...
Even a lot of condos and apartment buildings dont have recycling programs...

Its not neccessarily the offices fault... But rather building management. Take it up to the building management corp! It'll even save them Money since recycling is free, and they usually have to pay for garbage disposal.

Originally Posted by UrbanPoet

Its not neccessarily the offices fault... But rather building management. Take it up to the building management corp! It'll even save them Money since recycling is free, and they usually have to pay for garbage disposal.

It's been my experience that office / condo recycling is almost never free.

Originally Posted by dark169

It's been my experience that office / condo recycling is almost never free.

It might not be free but it is highly unlikely it would cost more than trash disposal, which they pay for by weight. Paper is heavy stuff.

my office is the same. paper recycling only. we set up a bottles/cans bin but im guessing the cleaning just throws it in the same bin as the garbage.

then when you tell ppl they think you're nagging...

Funny, when I was in NYC a couple yrs ago, recycling was non existent...at least in terms of restaurants, public property etc. Sad for such a cosmopolitan city.

Originally Posted by brunes

It might not be free but it is highly unlikely it would cost more than trash disposal, which they pay for by weight. Paper is heavy stuff.

You are correct that is is not free...but it does become an additional cost to companies...you have to pay for the service first regardless of weight (that gets tacked on later).

It is really frustrating making efforts to recycle when as stated, cleaners, companies, building management etc wash it all away

Originally Posted by 3rdcourtesy

Or you could work at a place like i do....put forth the effort of separating all your garbage and make sure it goes to its proper location to be recycled only to watch the cleaners come in and dump it all into the same bin to go to the compactor where nothing gets recycled.....

Ha.. my last job was in Australia and exactly the same thing would happen.. we couldnt believe it either

Originally Posted by stealth

Funny, when I was in NYC a couple yrs ago, recycling was non existent...at least in terms of restaurants, public property etc. Sad for such a cosmopolitan city.

Same for Detroit (well, not the cosmopolitan part.) The company I work for (~1,500 employees) has NO recycling whatsoever.

What's the point of recycling in Canada when our 10x larger neighbours to the south don't bother?

All the people who don't give a crap should be the ones suffering the effects of environmental degradation, not us...too bad we can't separate ourselves into different areas of the planet.