.. oh fuck that.

The firm I work for makes nothing but money and burns nothing but graduates. But now we have a green agenda which, I freely admit, has come of a bit of a shock. The only green things in the building are stumbling hangovers and forgotten new years resolution fruit. But as my colleague and “head of bins” explains we are now all gloriously empowered to chase and embrace the philanthropic market first trailblazed by Bill “I know I’m a nerdy, uncaring bastard but here’s a few quid to assuage my guilt” Gates.

It makes me so proud. We’ve suffixed every email with a trite reminder than by printing this electronic blame memo, entire regions of the amazon may be deforested (and here’s the rub, every extra pointless signature burns storage disks which are about as carbon friendly as a Hummer) and the battery coop of our office space is now festooned with colour coded bins each demarking a specific recycling repository.

Being all knit my own yogurt, I am completely bought into the middle class ideal of saving the planet. We recycle at home as if our life depended on it (you know, it just might), compost with wild abandon – mindless of the consequences of starting an organic chain reaction that could easily destroy the village – and drive carefully to the local dump (sorry household recycling centre) to dispose of the myriad of nasty stuff our right on council can’t be arsed to collect. Which includes the children – that’s a joke, oh hang on I’ve just counted, can anyone remember how many we used to have?

But the firm is spectacularly poor at being good at this kind of stuff, so instead of a simple voluntary system based on a disposal approach well understood from our own domestic shit, they’ve only gone and devised an entirely new regime. This has committee written all over it with a complex arrangement of multi coloured bins each with a narrow remit and lasting about five minutes before the (environmentally diffident) emails started to fly.

Now you could reasonably argue that the employees don’t really give a shit and would rather lampoon any well intentioned approach with questions such as “Do coffee cups count as wet or dry waste” and “what expense code do I charge my floor roaming bin hunt too?” and you’d be about right. But because the system is so complicated and the simple disposal of a bacon sandwich and quick gulped hot beverage requires an urban fox like visiting of about ten bins, they’ve kind of brought it on themselves. A Frequently Asked Questions email followed the removal of our personal bins attempting to stem the piss taking tide but from the raucous laughter of the majority, one feels that maybe not all the questions were that serious. Well not as serious as the answers which precisely described the exact disposal procedure for a half eaten banana.

So here’s what happens. Even the keenest wishy washy liberals amongst us take one look at bin alley before muttering “fuck that, I’ve got work to do” and deposit the entire contents of their desktop in the ‘non recyclable bin‘. Earlier today I chucked in my Laptop powered by dead hamster in there as well but so fetid were the contents it chucked it straight back out again. Alledgedly the bins are emptied twice a day but from the Friday fishy smell this morning, it would appear this is aspirational at best.

The smell makes my compost (you need to wee on it, no honestly you do, I have a thousand words on the subject, no honestly I have) seem appealing and a entire black market around selling empty hotdesks for bin space has thrown up many opportunities for personal currency advancement.

The firm will probably find a way to tax that so in the end, which may be the very reason they started down the road in the first place.

Me? I have recycled all my filing and am now filling every empty desk drawer with rotting compost. I admit as an act of rebellion it lacks something but once it explodes over the fire officer, my work will be complete.