Hi All! I'm working with a local healthcare system that is moving several offices into one building and taking advantage of this as an opportunity to work toward culture change for more sustainable behaviors. My colleague and I are working with them to plan their recycling program. They're seeking advice about best practices with regards to service ware.
They'll have kitchenette areas for employees who bring lunch and for mini-celebrations like birthdays, etc. They don't want to use plastic forks and other disposable service ware because of the waste, but they're concerned that if they stock reusable items, they'll have greater long-term expense because some will inevitably go missing and need to be re-stocked and they have to deal with the issue of people not washing their dirty dishes in a timely fashion. I thought maybe a 'welcome to the new building' gift of a travel cutlery set so everyone would have cutlery and if they lost their gift set then they would have to bring their own from home. But for birthday parties and such, you'd have groups of people all needing the sink to do their dishes at the same time.
They won't have a post-consumer organics diversion program in their kitchenettes.
I'd love for you to share your thoughts and experiences with this issue.
Thanks,
Katy
Katy Duggan-Haas
Sustainability Program Coordinator
Modern Recycling
United States
www.moderncorporation.com
Office Service Ware Best Practices
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Pamela makes great comments. My old office had rotating responsibility for taking out the compost--to a composter on a roof deck.
And she also makes great points about the social dynamics. I call the worry about people not doing their dishes, or losing dishes--or all that kind of worry--the "Expectation of Betrayal". This expectation is a terribly limiting thing in our world.
The fact is, the big broad brush solutions have all been done, and have reached their maximum payback. We are on to the smaller, more detailed, more costly solutions--those are harder to implement, and always have greater aspects of "failure". Try not to look at it as betrayal, but just as normal.
But our society has tended to choose the wrong response to this: In the face of people not washing their dishes, we have demanded perfection of a sort, and so we bought disposables, and threw everything away, every meal. A child trips on a playground, and so we put safety rails everywhere, and children never learn their limits.
Instead of this, we need to just love the imperfections of this imperfect world.
As Pamela said, dishes don't need to match. But if you want them to match, a trip to a good thrift shop will net you sets and sets of Corelle plates. In my city, they sell for 25 cents each, which is the same price as ONE styrofoam clamshell container.
So, just go buy a bunch of plates and bowls and cutlery. Look for free cutlery sets on Craigslist. I like used stuff, but you can watch for sales at IKEA.
And when too many walk away, just stop by the thrift shop again, and don't worry about it. I used to own a restaurant, and we used the customized mugs with people's pictures on them. We would find them at the thrift shop, and they became kind of a thing at our café.
For people like us that are working in the world of garbage all the time, losing plates and cutlery can seem huge. You might be tempted to do the Life Cycle Analysis of thrift store plates versus paper plates. I think this is a bad idea.
I think we need to worry less about now, and think more of the future. Paper plates are wasteful and unsustainable. That means in the future, we will NOT use them.
Sure, losing ceramic plates isn't very sustainable, and you may worry about the hot water of washing dishes. But in the future we WILL be using ceramic plates, and we will be washing them. How we arrange that may look different from how we arrange our office kitchenette now, but we will be washing real plates.
So, I prefer to try to work with what might be sustainable in the future, rather than what is less bad, but unsustainable now.
Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com
We struggle with similar issues. We even have a dishwasher in our office kitchen, and invariably some people still leave dirty dishes in the sink. Unfortunately, there will never be 100% compliance on shared tasks. I think it might help if the director and/or managers would set the expectation and be explicit that each person will put their dishes in the dishwasher and perhaps reinforce that message periodically at staff meetings. Something similar could be done when employees have to hand-wash dishes, but I suspect a rotating assignment (you wash dishes on Monday; I do it on Tuesday) or a team-rotational system would be more effective.
Our office kitchen is stocked with dishes and cutlery that employees have brought from home over the years -- stuff that would have been donated or discarded otherwise. It doesn't match, of course, but no one seems to mind. It is possible to stock or restock disappearing or broken items on the cheap by asking employees to bring in what they no longer need at home or by canvassing thrift stores and garage sales.
We hosted a department-wide celebration a few months ago and needed about 70 place settings. We found it most cost-effective to rent linens and dishes and to purchase mid-grade cutlery for future celebrations.
We lack a commercial composting facility in our valley, so we set up a small-scale food scrap diversion program in our kitchen. We converted old coffee cans to collection containers, and about once a week I or someone else with a compost bin takes it home. It's very manageable!
Pamela Williams
Boise Public Works
United States