Freewrite #6 - Happy to see my office becoming social aware

In my office a few days back we all received an email from the Admin department saying that they have decided to become more social-aware and planning to help the nature and ecosystem by going green. I was a bit surprised to see the mail. The content of the email said something similar to the below:

As a part of earth day initiative we are planning to reduce the number of dustbin count inside the office.

Reducing the dustbin count. Sounds really interesting right? Yes, I'm trying to take this in a very positive note. Of course, reducing the number of dustbins actually helps. When we initially got this email, we were all surprised and found it to be a stupid move. Later after understanding the complete significance of this activity, I was so convinced. Currently, we have around 300 workstations and they have around 300 dustbins. Each dustbin is being covered by a bin bag plastic cover to collect the garbage. If they decide the clean the garbage every two days, they technically are throwing 300 bin bags to the garbage along with the garbage that is being collected every day. Even if the bag is full or not they collect it every two days and dump them along with the garbage. If we observe this clearly, we can see that there are more plastic bags being disposed of compared to that of the actual garbage.

I don't know how the admin team realized about this issue but they have come up with a really amazing solution. They reduced the number of dustbins to less than 10. They gave few reasons for this new change.

• The main reason for this change was to reduce the number of trash bags being collected. There was a significant reduction.
• If the trash bins are located in a distance from the workstations, the employees get an opportunity to walk a little bit to throw their trash.
• Some people have the habit of throwing a half used paper immediately to a bin nearby. If the bin is far away, the half used paper will remain on the desk for a longer period of time and they tend to reuse the half used paper.
• When they get up and walk to throw the trash, they meet their neighbouring employees and have a small chit chat or just a small smile. This will help in team interactions.
• Though there will be a challenge where the employees may not be able to through the trash items then and there to the bin, they will still get more responsible in collecting the trash near them and dumping them when it is accumulated.

Go Green initiatives

This idea of reducing dustbins emerged as a go green initiatives during the week of Earth Day. But I still feel there are lots of other areas where innovations similar to this can be made to reduce the plastic and paper wastes that we are accumulating in the office. In most of the offices, the papers and tissues that are being used are not sent for proper recycling. Most of them are mixed with trashed and dumped along with other garbages. We cannot completely blame company alone. It is a collective initiative to be implemented by the company as well as garbage collectors to actually plan and recycle the garbage wastes.

In the recent years, there have been lots of awareness programmes and initiates taken in offices to make the employees be more social-aware. Nowadays all the corporate companies have an inbuilt program called CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to contribute their part to this society. The initiatives are not only happening outside but also by enhancing the way the company works day to day. Garbage reduction was also one such idea that emerged out of like-minded individuals. This idea of reducing the garbage bins inside the office really attracted me as a good move by the organization. I guess every company should explore about this and get it implemented for the benefit of the society.

If our ecosystem is not protected now, we will not be having a good place to stay in the future. Do let me know your thoughts on this in the comments section.

Image Source (CC0 Licence): [1], [2], [3].

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