Yellow and Grey - The New Green
03 May 2008 by Peter Barrett
I’m sitting at my desk at work about two yards away from two funny looking plastic bins. One has a grey top and the other is bright yellow. We’ve recently decided to get rid of all our litter bins in our office and just use these two (much larger ones) instead. One is for paper and plastic recycling and the other for general waste. It also means you have to now get up and walk to deposit your rubbish (unless you decide simply to leave it on your desk, where it will stay as the cleaners have been told not to move it…). This is a nice example of Generous working – at work.
But I’ve noticed that all the large corporations now seem to be jumping on the bandwagon around green, climate change, sustainability etc and it is difficult to be genuinely interested in the planet without it sounding like another cynical corporate marketing campaign (I work in marketing so I do know a thing or two about this).
However, I even find myself re-using plastic cups for drinking water during the day. I never used to do this before the big bins arrived – even though I knew it was a good thing to do. But having to get rid of your rubbish in recycling containers forces you to think about the amount of rubbish you actually generate – and it is a lot! There seems to be a slow, but growing, movement around our company (it’s a Japanese-owned IT company) to try and actually think about this stuff and act accordingly. Nothing heavy, no evangelical speeches by top management either, just a gentle kind of persuasion from the bottom upwards. Yellow and grey – it’s the new green.
Join the fray by signing in.
About the Blogger
Peter Barrett
A fan of Arcade Fire, U2, T-Bone Burnett, Radiohead, Everton football club (since I was zero), Liverpool (the town where I was born), poems (writing and reading them), Flannery O’Connor and David Mitchell, coastlines and deserted places, changing the world while having fun and films by Martin Scorcese.
London, GB , 13 May 2008
It’s amazing what a difference can come just from making things visible. I just overheard a conversation where someone was telling of how he asked at a conference how many people in various companies knew which department paid the electricity bills. Very few did, we’ve all just externalised that, along with lots of other costs financial or physical.
How much difference would it make if individual departments had to pick up the tab more directly and sometimes choose between their preferred priorities and till-then-invisible infrastructure?
Godalming, GB , 23 Jun 2008
Reusing your plastic cup is good, Peter, but have you considered that taking up the Generous challenge to take in your own washable glass or cup might be even better?
We’re meant to be getting bins for recycling at work in August, which I’m looking forward to as well as wondering how that will work out in practice.
Godalming, GB , 23 Jun 2008
I see your fifth action, in 2005, was to take a mug to work. Didn’t it work out?
Luton, GB , 15 Jul 2008
Ever thought about taking a mug to work (see list of Generous Actions!) and thereby not using a PLASTIC cup at all?!!!!!!