I normally leave environmental blogging to my wife, but I have been personally affected by the environment, so I’ll jump in this time.  My employer, being a large university, generates a lot of trash.  Only recently has there been a big push to improve the sustainability of campus.  A while back, the bathrooms switched to those neat foam soaps and paper made from recycled products.  The new addition to the Mechanical Engineering Building is being designed and built to meet LEED certification.  Now my building is one of the first to participate in a new project: no more trash cans.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Building Services staff removed the trash cans from all of the offices in the building.  Instead, each office now has a recycling bin.  There’s a separate compartment for office paper, and mixed recyclables go in the big part.  The janitor will empty the recycling bins twice a week, but everyone’s responsible for taking their own trash to the public cans in the hallways.  The idea is to reduce the trash by 65%.

So far, it seems pretty well received.  I think most people can probably recycle most of the stuff they throw out. I’m totally in favor of this, and frankly I’m a bit surprised that it took so long for campus to make it easy to recycle.