Centerbrook's Recycling Center
Five years ago, when I started at Centerbrook, the office was following standard recycling procedures – separate bins scattered about for paper, glass, and bottles – with a few creative twists.
The Treasure Chest
For example, we could deposit into “The Treasure Chest” items that we no longer wanted but still had some life in them – you know, the “My trash, Your treasure” syndrome. The jade plant on my desk is growing happily in a flower pot that I rescued from oblivion.
Then, we launched an office design competition to make light fixtures out of unwanted CDs (Orleans, Debbie Boone, Pat Boone, Air Supply, Insane Clown Posse, etc.). We also hosted the annual St. Tyron festival, where ties, jewelry, and scarves were swapped, or simply scarfed up. Clothes do come back in style, after all, eventually, they say.
Recycling sure was hard in aught-5, but today you almost have to go out of your way not to recycle. The office has switched to a single stream system in which the most common recyclables (paper, bottles, cans, plastic containers, etc.) are mixed together in one collection to be sorted out down the road.
Our personal trash cans, no longer bedecked with plastic bags, now serve as integral recycling receptacles. Only big communal trash bins have plastic liners, and right next to each of them is an equally large recycling bin. For specialty items we’ve built a Recycling Station to collect packing peanuts, batteries, cell phones, plastic grocery bags, compact florescent light bulbs, bubble wrap, soda can pull tabs, and clothes hangers.
Before the single stream recycling started accepting #5 plastics, we were collecting these containers, most commonly recognized as yogurt cups, and sending them to a company called Preserve Gimme 5. Once a year (or whenever it’s time for me to replace my running shoes) we hold a Sneaker Drive and bring them to the local Nike Outlet for the company’s Reuse a Shoe Program.
We’ve even gone so far as to start composting our food! Located at the coffee bar and office kitchen are compost collection canisters that are deposited in outdoor composters, which are at the disposal of local designing gardeners.
This composting “solar digester” is embedded in a discreet corner of the Centerbrook lawn leading to the millpond. A buried digestion chamber can handle as much as 20 pounds of food scraps a week. Photo by Laura Taglianetti.
Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
