Advice for recycling for small offfice

jaybird

I work in a fairly small office of approx 12 people in North Dublin. We have no recycling facilities at all, and throw away large amounts of paper etc. As an avid home recycler it really kills me to see so much paper going in the waste bin. Can anyone advise me as to a cost effective method for recycling office waste for a small office? I have been told I can set something up as long as it doesn't cost much.
Any ideas?

Misty Moon

Not sure about paper - reckon you'd have to pay for that and for commercial it's probably not cheap. Are you in a building on your own? If there are other companies in the same building it might be worth checking what they are doing. Otherwise start with the local council and ring to ask if they have any facilities or commercial collections - if they don't, they may still be able to give you some contacts who do. I'd imagine ringing places like Oxigen would be a help too. At least you could start to get an idea of how much it might cost.

With regard to glass and plastic, I used to work in a small office and just brought any bottles home with me and recycled from there. Where I am now, myself and a colleague take it in turns to take compost material - we have a small bin set up in the kitchen for people to put tea bags and fruit skins etc. into and just put it into Tupperware to bring it home every day.

Printer cartridges/toner bottles - if you don't return these to your supplier when getting new ones, there are lots of charities which will take them off your hands. Temple Street is one I know of and the Jack and Jill Children's Foundation too (www.jackandjill.ie)

unnameduser

i work in a small office too. there is no recycling facilites here either but i take paper etc away and recycle it from home.

My little bit for mother nature

hotlips_h

I've noticed a lot of small businesses, shops and offices, leaving out bags of stuff for this crowd
http://www.ozo.ie/. I don't anything about them but it might be worth contacting them.

We are in a similar situation. We gather up our paper into bags and have it picked up when we have about 10 bags by a company called Cara Waste Management. They take our cardboard packaging also. I just checked the invoices and we pay between €35 and €70 per collection so it's pretty reasonable.

With regard to plastic, it's mostly the employees' drinks bottles from lunch and we pool these and take them to a domestic recycling centre - uses less fuel than having the employees take them home and recycle them themselves. (I'm impressed with Misty Moon's composting! We haven't gone that far.) You're not allowed to take commercial waste to domestic recycling centres so I guess you have to be careful what you take.

To do our bit in the office we have done the following:
- removed bins from individual desks and replaced them with paper recycling bins only. If people have other rubbish, they have to walk to a main bin
- asked cleaning staff not to replace bags in bins until they are pretty dirty
- have employees use glasses only for drinking water. Plastic cups are only for temporary visitors
- print only what you need to print. Try to operate paperless where possible.

You've probably done all that already though!

Archeron

I work in a small office of 7 people, and what we do is:

Store all cardboard folded in the warehouse. When I have a van load, I bring it to my own local recycling centre in my home town.

All paper goes into the shredder and we use it as packing material for sending out customer orders.

All bottles and cans are kept in a big box and we all take turns bringing them home and putting them in our personal recycling wheelie bins.

All ink cartridges and toners and mobile phones go to the Temple Street Hospital. They sent us out a big box to store everything in til its ready for collection.

All packing material we get in such as bubble wrap, styrofoam peanuts etc are stored in a specially dedicated area and we re-use them for sending out orders.

For rubbish, we have one of those big 1100 litre wheelie bins, and since we implemented the recycling bits and bobs above, we'v changed from empyting it twice a month to once a month.

paddyjameson

Up until now I had no faith in any of the waste companies, Currently with a crowd envirogreen recycling they are doing a dam good job, just hope they don't ever let me down, or else I will have lost all faith in recycling companies

Pete M.

Contact any waste company and tell them what the story is.

You should be able to get a green bin for dry recyclables i.e. paper, cardboards, plastic bottles, cans etc.
There are also office waste specialist companies out there who may collect paper, cardboard.

All of your cartridges can be sent to charitable organisations like the Jack & Jill Foundation (no affiliation btw) for nada, and you're helping a good cause.

Depending on the size of the outfit you work for and if there is a canteen, you may also be obliged to have a brown bin for organic waste.

This will cost less than sending all of your waste to landfill.

I am involved in changing the waste management in a rather large organisation and the cost savings are mental.

All it needs is a bit of management.

djpbarry

As it's been almost a year since the OP posted on boards, I think it's unlikely that they're still monitoring this 4.5 year-old thread.