Does your office recycle? If it doesn’t, why not? Set one up! Often times, offices have the mentality of waiting for someone else to do it, but its okay to speak up. For example, my office did not have a recycling bin in the kitchen. We have free sodas at work so people tend to drink a lot of sodas. After having one put in there, the bin actually fills up pretty fast! All that was necessary was for someone to speak up and everyone else will follow in your footsteps.

Tons of paper get used everyday in offices and not all of it gets recycled. A study found that 60% of the waste produced in financial companies was paper waste. Here is a guideline for some suggestions on starting a recycling program at work.

Here are some tips to save paper at work:

• Use dual sided printing. Ask your System Administrator if your office printer has that function as larger offices usually have at least one printer with dual sided printing.
• Try to send emails instead of printing out documents unless necessary. 
• For Powerpoint slides, you can always print more than one slide on a piece of paper. In the printing options, you can choose to print 2, 3, or even 6 slides on one piece of paper. If you print on both sides of the paper, you can have 12 slides on one piece of paper instead of having 12 pieces of paper.
• Use non-confidential paper as scratch paper if there is nothing on the back.
• For confidential paper, there are services that routinely pick up a locked bin filled with your confidential paper, and they will shread it and recycle it for you.

For more local recycling resources and services, take a look at this page on the Earth911.org website.  There are numerous items that can be reused or recycling and you can find the nearest recycling centers by entering your location.