Monday's "Trash" Generated at the Office

With the first weekday of this experiment nearly complete I can say (and show above) that my impact has been small. Other than that napkin I used out of habit during lunch I haven't produced any non-compostable or non-recyclable waste worth mentioning. Missing from the photo are the two eggshells from breakfast now sitting in the compost container in the freezer awaiting a trip across the street to the compost bin in our community garden. Tonight after work I was called to help my brother-in-law with a screen test. He provided dinner from a great Mexican restaurant in his neighborhood. I chose a meal with just a piece of wax paper and a sheet of aluminum foil. 

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

This impressively small amount of workday waste was made easy by the comforts of home we enjoy at our office. Each floor is equipped with a kitchen that includes dishware, silverware, mugs, cups, a sink, and a dishwasher. Each kitchen also includes a hook with two reusable bags for staff to take with them while out getting lunch or running errands. And if you do need a napkin you grab one made from 100% post-consumer recycled paper fibers.

The Simple Steps to a Small Footprint

Below are the reusable things that made it so easy to avoid paper and plastic.

About the Rest of the Waste

Even with our best efforts to reduce our consumption here at NRDC, there is no getting around the fact that an office of almost 140 people is going to make some trash. The key is to pull as much of the recyclable content out of the stream before it reaches the truck down on 20th Street. To achieve that goal we've contracted with haulers who can accept just about every kind of paper, plastic, glass, and metal we can collect. And we separate out the redeemables for a guy who lives in the neighborhood. Here is a snashot of what goes where when it leaves the office:

And where do those numbers come from? Picking through lots of bags like this:

What's in the Bag Doesnt Lie (or Why We Picked Through Our Own Trash at 8:00 in the Morning for Five Days Including Saturday)

Earlier this year a handful of NRDCers conducted a waste audit at the New York Office. We arrived at the office in the morning before the rest of the staff to pick through the previous day's trash (set aside for us by the cleaning staff) and methodically measured the weight and counted the number of recyclable items that had carelessly been tossed. We made both quantitative and qualitative notes about what we found in the bags to help gain a clear picture of what we were sending to the landfill and how we send less.

The Quick and Dirty on NRDC's Waste Audit

We began our audit on Tuesday morning with Monday's trash and then continued for a total of five days. We came in on Saturday morning so we could capture the effects of changes in behavior at the end of the week (Hey, it's Friday. Let's treat ourselves to take out and lots of unnecessary packaging) and measure the effect of our refrigerators being cleaned out (as they are on a rotating Friday schedule). Keeping the audit a secret to get valid results meant that all week long we had to work quickly and quietly in the freight elevator areas to avoiding attention. It was a nice change on Saturday to leisurely put on our rubber gloves and weigh coffee grinds down to the tenth of an ounce!

Hooray for Us, and Some Room for Improvement

When the last used tea bag had been counted and all the trash returned to its bags we crunched our data and found that, as a whole, our office is doing quite well. In the upper left corner of trash bag photo above you can see a few of the items that should've been recycled: aluminum dish from Chipotle and aluminum foil, plastic drink cups, Starbucks coffee cup sleeves, frozen food box, and a draft copy of a wonky carbon allowance allocation chart (if interested, the final version is in this Cap 2.0 policy brief). There were also some coffee grinds and a tea bag or two that should've been composted (for more details on NRDC's compost program check out today's post from Lindsi. That bag contained more "mistakes" than most.

Audit Your Office

Conducting the trash audit was one of the most satisfying projects I've been a part of in my 2.5 years here at NRDC. The work was important and concrete and results garnered a lot of attention around our office. Our colleagues were grateful for the care we put into the crafting the audit and for the ideas about how we might all perform better.

Think your office is already doing a pretty good job on the trash front? Or know that your coworkers are doing more than their share to trash the planet? If you'd like more information on how to take a closer look at your office's waste then drop me a note in the comments section.