"Please Feel Guilty” was the statement that I put on the back of our Recycling Committee T-Shirts in college. The point then, as it is now, is to make people feel guilty or at least aware of their recycling decisions.
According to an article written by the Resource Conservation Alliance titled Paper Consumption, the world loses 30 million forested acres per year (the size of State of Pennsylvania) and 40 percent of the wood is used for paper.
Every day at the workplace we make conscious decisions to recycle or not to recycle items such as used copy paper, junk mail, or even an empty can of soda.
Mostly, we do not recycle or reuse because we are lazy and are stuck on the concept of convenience. Another reason is that the office environment is not set up properly to make recycling easy for their employees. If there is no paper recycling bin, I doubt many employees will be willing to take their recyclable paper home with them.
In preparation for this article, I set up recycling bins in each person’s office in addition to the main recycling bin that we have next to the copy machine. For the last several months, I have been weighing the amount of paper that we recycle. (Continued on PDF)