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Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Too much

I think I'm becoming a weirdo about recycling. The combination of L's locavore wisdom and scathing disdain for bottled water, plus the reams of paper that fly around my office on a daily basis, have pushed me over the edge.

Our printers at work (where I am at this moment, mind you, and there's a long time yet before I'm going home) are set so that the first page of every document is a paper identifying who printed the thing. So today I casually told my administrative assistant (!!) that if she wanted to set aside all those papers, I would be happy to bring them home to recycle, since there isn't really any recycling here at the office. She looked at me like I was crazy. I began to feel stupid, and all of my environmental righteousness leaked out of my body like toxic waste out of a drum barrel as I explained how I set aside all my recyclable, non-confidential papers to recycle at home. Is that weird?

At Chipotle tonight for my pathetic lonely dinner, which I squeezed in between billable minutes at some alien midtown Chipotle, I set aside the bottle I had purchased with my meal so they could recycle it. Then I saw another bottle lying on top of the garbage, so I plucked it out for recycling, too. Then I noticed a second bottle in the garbage, under some napkins that didn't look too dirty, so I pulled that one out. Then I saw a third bottle, just a little deeper, and I was going to reach in when I realized -- you need to leave. Do not root through the garbage at Chipotle. But that's not weird, right?

2 comments:

Stephen Shingler said...

no not weird at all.. it drives me nuts that my parents don't recycle!! your admin asst wouldn't happen to be Leah Wilkins would it ?

anp said...

I second this! I was surprised to find at Citi that we did not have bottle or aluminum can recycling. So, I used to keep a lined box in the back of my cubicle. And, every few weeks, when I was the last person to leave the office, I would trudge home with my garbage bag full of cans and bottles. The hobos in Tribeca would stand and applaud me enviously on my walk home.