No trash cans for Google employees

I live in a town in Michigan that has a landfill that receives waste from local towns and across the state and who knows where else. There is another landfill three times as large not 30 minutes away. So I agree that throwing trash "away" could be in your own backyard if you are unfortunate enough to live near a landfill. From a business and personal standpoint, we should all be looking to reduce and reuse as much as possible without compromising sanitary and healthy living. An added.... More

Google employees subjected to this idiocy should save a week's worth of snotty tissues, put them in an interoffice envelope, and then send the envelope to the cretin whose idea this was.

I work at Google Mountain View, where they reduced the number of garbage cans. A consequence is that used tissues sit on people's desks because they'd have to stop what they're doing and get up to throw them out, rather than being able to immediately discard them in a bin by their desk. I'm all for reducing waste, but it hasn't had that effect for me: just increasing germs and distracting people from work. (It takes a while for a programmer to get in the zone.)

Wow, that last comment was sarcastic and uncalled for. I think it's a great thing. I am continually unnerved by the amount of trash that is wasted in our office. All my efforts to nudge "the boss" into printing less and throwing away less has been to no avail. Very frustrating.

Yep, definitely a no brainer idea that makes a huge difference. It would be good if all homes and offices could adopt a similar idea to take away the 'convenience' of throwing things away (to a place that doesn't actually exist - have you ever stopped to think where 'away' is?!)
We've written about this several times on our site about reducing landfill waste:

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This is great for raising awareness about the volume of garbage each of us produces, as well as improving that part of our environuman impact. I wonder if Google should couple the program with health tests to see if there is any measurable difference in this group of employees' health from the extra exercise over the course of a year.

Next thing you know, Google will remove the toilets from their buildings, as an effort to reduce water consumption. Employees will then have to either wait until they get home to go to the bathroom, wander outside and find a tree, or use their supervisor's desk as a urine and fecal receptical.