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Can we talk about how compostable cups still get tossed in the trash at my office | Climate Action - Free To Speak

Can we talk about how compostable cups still get tossed in the trash at my office

I was standing in the break room at my clinic in Columbus last Tuesday and watched a coworker scrape her lunch into the trash, then drop her "compostable" fork and bowl right on top of it. I asked her about it and she shrugged and said "it's basically the same thing, right?" No. It is not. I called the city's waste office the next day and the guy told me those cups only break down in a real commercial facility at 140 degrees, and our building's dumpster goes straight to the landfill where they sit for decades just like regular plastic. We have three green bins on our floor and people still miss them because the lids are the same color as the trash cans. I emailed our office manager and asked for a sign with a photo of what goes where, and she said she'd "look into it." So now I'm the weirdo who digs forks out of the trash and moves them, which I know looks nuts but I can't unsee it. Has anyone actually gotten a building to fix this, or am I wasting my time?

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1 Comment

gavin22816d ago

Man, I feel this in my soul! We had the exact same mess at my last building, compostable clamshells from the cafe going right into the regular trash because nobody could tell the bins apart. The kicker was the "green" bins were actually dark gray with a tiny green sticker on the side, so of course people just dumped everything in whatever was closest. A few of us got fed up and started taking photos of the signs at a nearby library that actually made it clear, then we brought those pics to our building manager and basically refused to leave until she ordered real ones. It took like two months of nagging but we finally got big bright signs with photos of actual cups and forks taped above every bin, and honestly the mix-up rate dropped a ton after that. My advice is keep digging those forks out if you have to, but also get a couple coworkers on your side so you are not the only "weirdo" fighting this. One person complaining is easy to ignore, five people asking for the same sign is a lot harder to brush off.