It's a mad world

Waste in this office is astounding. Are all offices like this? I have worked in one other office recently, and my boss there didn't believe in global warming, yet I somehow managed to convince her to buy recycled paper. Here, however, it's pure virgin bleached paper for all! Only paper made from freshly cut trees is good enough for us! Huge documents get printed without a second thought and then often don't get fully used. I have to print documents three or four times for all the different places they need to be filed. Photocopying something that's two-sided just to make it one-sided? Sure, all the time! Lights on all night? Why not? Leaving the noisy, old fan running in the bathroom all day (along with the lights)? Definitely.

Some things aren't so bad. Although we print everything on one-sided paper, if it's not being sent to a client or the CRA we reuse the paper as scrap, and I print most documents bound for the filing cabinet on this paper. We've also got paper recycling in the form of a shredder (but no bottle recycling which will have me carrying home my daily cans of Coke Zero for recycling during the hot months this summer). I'm pretty sure the heat gets turned off at night, and all the computers but one get turned off at night (the one that gets left on accepts the faxes, so it needs to be running). Oh, and we don't use an old-school fax, all our faxes come in through my computer so that all those annoying spam-faxes don't get automatically printed.

But still, the paper waste is astounding. We probably go through at least a few thousand pages a week, and there's only 5 of us in the office.