Workplace Recycling

As I mentioned in my last post, I work as a Registered Nurse. I'm currently working in a rest home and am finding it increasingly difficult to accept this throw-away profession. Of course for health reasons we have to follow strict protocols for hand hygiene, wound care etc etc, and this unfortunately means using what seems to be an excess amount of paper towels and chemical laden soaps and sanitisers (even though our paper towels are sourced from renewable sources), as well as single use sterile dressings, each in their own individual plastic wrappers. I felt that there had to be something I could do at my work to decrease our carbon footprint, so my first project is workplace recycling. 

To be honest it is pretty shocking that we have not been recycling much at work except for cardboard boxes, the occasional milk bottle (when people can be bothered rinsing them), and some of our tins go to the Scouts. Being a decent sized rest home with 80+ residents living in the area where I work, the fact that all of these people's personal care products (shampoo, body wash, lotions and creams), medicine bottles and boxes, and drink containers (soft drinks, wine and beer)  are all just being thrown in the bin when finished is pretty terrible and awfully lazy of us! The majority of staff I have talked to about recycling do it consciously at home, and they said that the main reason they weren't doing it at work was because there was no system in place. 

So I hassled the people at work who can get me things, and a lovely green container was produced for me to use as our temporary recycling bin until a better system can be put in place. The idea of this bin is that people will put recyclables into it (hopefully after, but not always as I have learnt, rinsing them) and I have taken it to be my personal responsibility to ensure that the items are sorted, clean, and recycled either in my home recycling bin or by taking it to our local recycling centre.  

The bin has been in place for about two weeks now, and unfortunately (but also thankfully!) the first bin full was recycled before I thought up the idea of documenting what people were recycling so I could offer some statistics to people about how well, or how much better we could be doing. After work today however, I had two separate bin fulls of recycling at home from work which I cleaned, weighed (yes, on my kitchen scales!) and then created spread sheets to show the data...

Some of the recycling that I had sorted

I weighed and documented 76 different recyclable objects, then counted and worked out the amounts of these objects I had received and the total weight of each bin load (I'm still trying to remember learning about spreadsheets and for my life I couldn't remember how to even to sums of the rows so I had to use the handy calculator on my phone and input them one by one). Each bin contained 3.6kg (or 3600 grams) of recyclable goodies. Each bin contained about four days worth of recycling.... which in the scale of things isn't particularly great considering the amount that could be in there. I haven't yet figured out how to make those pretty graphs on Excel to show to people and explain to them that although some effort is being made, surely we can do much better! It's also interesting that only five empty toilet rolls have been put into the recycling bin in the past 8 days despite everyone, staff and residents, actually having to use this!

I will empty the recycling bin again on Sunday and write up the data; hopefully I'll have a fancy graph to show in a few months of our increased recycling efforts!

Still working on our rules for garbage free living, but should have these up and ready by Monday for us to officiailly start our challenge!