Greening Your Office

If you need to go out and get some new supplies for the office, look for the TerraCycle products coming to OfficeMax. According to GreenBiz.com, the office supply store will begin stocking some of TerraCycle's products, such as the pencil holders made from Capri Sun pouches. The neat thing about TerraCycle is that they are repurposing (reusing) products rather than recycling them in the more common sense of melting them down and turning them into something else, which uses plenty of energy. Of course looking at their products makes it easy for the crafty to make some of the stuff themselves, but I don't think the company would be too upset about that.

Greening Your Office

There's a good article today over on GreenBiz.com about creating The Zero Waste Office. Waste has been one of my primary concerns going way back to grade school in the 70's where I was taught to "waste not, want not" and "reduce, reuse, recycle". The latter of which is hierarchical. That is, try to reduce first, if that's not possible, reuse, then recycle. It seems too often people jump right into recycling without trying the others first. Being one that pretty much abhors waste, I'd like to see people begin bragging about how much they've reduced and reused before they talk about their recycling efforts. Which gets me back to the article. It's one of the few I've read recently that actually brings up the old reduce, reuse, recycle concept. The thing is, it makes perfect business sense. Reducing and reusing saves money, recycling usually doesn't, and in fact may even cost money. Any organization, whether it's a for-profit business, a non-profit charity or even a family, can benefit from saving money by reducing and reusing.