Why do office recycling bins turn us into monsters?

Most of the time, I know that my colleagues are smart, dedicated, collaborative people. Then occasionally I catch a glimpse inside the office recycling bins and I think: who are these monsters?

Why would anyone throw a half-eaten apple in the paper recycling? Who thinks a coffee cup counts as food waste? What must their homes look like?

Anecdotal evidence, accumulated over my career, suggests that professional people are terrible at basic recycling in the office. Or, to put it kindly, they aren’t quite good enough. If you put just, say, two banana skins or a half-finished soup carton in a paper recycling bin, the whole sack may well be deemed contaminated – and incinerated. In recycling, as in crypto, a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.

So why can all these intelligent office workers not follow basic instructions? A senior colleague confesses to me that he only recently learnt to wash out baked beans tins at home. Another member of staff says apologetically: “I do try quite hard, but I get confused by coffee cups.”

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In an absolute utopia, nothing would be single-use and there wouldn’t be any packaging, full stop. But that’s not going to be possible

The act of recycling is sufficiently annoying that UK prime minister Rishi Sunak promised to scrap “proposals for households to have seven bins” as part of his recent political relaunch (although such proposals did not seem to exist, and promising to scrap them has not reversed his dire poll ratings).

But there are psychological reasons why it is particularly annoying in the office. We might do something time-consuming at home simply because we believe it’s the right thing to do. But we’re less likely to do that at work, where we’re used to being paid for our efforts.

This is why no one waters the office pot plant or puts their cup in the office dishwasher. “At home, there’s more time, there’s more space,” says Simon Futcher, commercial business development director at waste company Veolia UK.

Disposable coffee cups look like they should be recycled, but most are a mix of plastic and paper, which is hard to separate

Another aspect is control. At home, we set the rules. “You’ve got that ownership of your bin,” says Adam Herriott of the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a charity. You also get the blame when it goes wrong. At work, “the recycling gods won’t know it was me”, says one colleague. In one survey, laboratory workers estimated they recycled two-thirds of their rubbish at home, but only one-third at work (or when on holiday).

Facilities teams try to simplify things, streamlining the number of bins, pinning up posters with clear instructions, broadcasting encouraging messages. But the world is against them. Disposable coffee cups look like they should be recycled, but most are a mix of plastic and paper, which is hard to separate. Mostly, they should go in the main waste bin. Tissues look like they should go in the paper bin, but the paper fibres have been recycled so often that they can’t be recycled again.

It would be easier to sort these products out before they get to consumers. England banned plastic straws and coffee stirrers in 2020, and earlier this month banned plastic cutlery and polystyrene cups. Many office canteens have eliminated all disposable cups.

“In an absolute utopia, nothing would be single-use and there wouldn’t be any packaging, full stop,” says Herriott. “But that’s not going to be possible.”

Futcher says that, on average, offices have gone from recycling about 10 per cent of their waste two decades ago, to about 45 per cent today. When I found the man responsible for recycling at Financial Times HQ, he brought me surprising news: the FT is relatively good at it. At last count, we recycled 82 per cent of our waste.

In one survey, laboratory workers estimated they recycled two-thirds of their rubbish at home, but only one-third at work

Companies have a financial incentive to promote recycling. The FT’s waste collector charges four times more for each kilo of general waste than for a kilo of separate food waste. But individual office workers do not get paid for putting a Coke can in the right bin.

Environmental experts point out that recycling is less important than other sustainability measures. Because the recycling process involves waste and energy, it is less effective than using less stuff (but more effective than not recycling).

It may even be counterproductive. In his book Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis cites a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology which found that participants used twice as much paper in an office task when a recycling bin was present than if one wasn’t. In other words, a belief in recycling may make us carefree.

There may be one upside to realising how bad recycling is in the office: we might produce less waste in the first place. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023