I once interned for my predecessor and I have since inherited his office. While he is a generally lovely and helpful person he had one of those offices where you would walk in on any given day and try to step over reams of paper stacked against the walls and on the floor. And take care not to tread on an important document from 1974. He took his paper with him, but left me with binders from 1998 that have yet to be looked through and a drawer that seems as if he decided to hide the evidence of a paper factory explosion gone awry.

When people come into my office they remark on its emptiness. It's so "clean" and "neat" and "sterile". They look around startled probably because they had no idea that there was actual carpet on the floor. Everyone else in the building has the same paper piles everywhere. The cheap flimsy file folders in stacks along bookshelves. I find myself to be the antithesis what with my lack of usage of the printer and photocopier and my crazy ability to file emails to the network drive as opposed to printing out each and every one to have it stare back at me for 15 months straight.

I've remarked to my colleagues about how much paper we use. They 'poo-poo' those claims because I must be the nutty one. "Oh that crazy Heather Barmore", they say. "She and her talk of recycling". And then to prove their point they toss a plastic bottle into the regular garbage can. While I sit in a corner and rock back and forth because it is so very maddening.

I wouldn't call myself a particularly 'green' person. But I do have a problem with general waste and so I try to be conscious of what I use. Especially this day in age when not every single thing needs to be printed out and put into a three ring binder. A three ring binder which is now collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. It's probably the blogger in me. The anal retentive geek that comes out every once in awhile to announce that instead of killing 987 trees for something that I will never, ever read, one could just make a website or a wiki to aggregate and disseminate information.
But like I said, that's just crazy talk. So to answer my own question, my office is not very green. Though word on the street is that they're aware of this and working on it, starting with the paper problem. And would you like to know how they got this information to the staff at large? A three page memo.