Green Minded Wallet

If you’ve stayed at a hotel recently, you may have discovered that they have started putting these little cards in your room about how much water and energy is spent on cleaning hotel room linens and they encourage you to reuse your bedding and towels. Well the hotel I stayed at last week had some of these cards. As much as I think that this is a good idea, seeing as I don’t personally feel the need to change my sheets or towels when I’m at home once a day (though I know people that do), there was a major flaw in their system. Here’s the problem: this (up-scale) hotel had absolutely no place to easily hang a towel to dry. There was a tiny rack above the sink that was holding a number of folded towels, which meant that there wasn’t enough space to spread them out to dry. There was no (real) hanging space on the back of the door, and the shower rod was inaccessible to shorter people (in fact the bathroom looked like it was designed for college basketball players). I can see how it could have worked if there was only one person in the room, but since there were two of us, it was impractical. So my suggestion would be, if you’re going to encourage people to conserve, make sure that there is a feasible way for them to do so. There are some of us who would like to help, but aren’t willing to go so far as reusing damp hotel towels.

Have you ever experienced this or other impractical conservation attempts?

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I went to a local grocery store to recycle some bottles this evening. It was on my route and I really just wanted to get the containers out of my house. I had a collection of cans and bottles (15 total), bought from various places around town. Well turns out the store that I went to only recycles bottles and cans that they sell. While I can understand why they do this, it was still a frustrating experience as I was only able to recycle 5 of my 15 items and this is the only grocery store in town that takes deposit containers. When I went in to redeem my coupons I asked the lady at the customer service desk if there was someplace else I could take the containers. Turns out there is a bottle redemption place a few miles from my house, and hopefully I can get my containers redeemed there. I will probably try and take my containers to the bottle redemption center in the next week or two, however the problem is that they have very inconvenient hours. I truly support recycling, but I think that if it’s going to be effective, it needs to be convenient. There are some people that will make an effort no matter what, but there are others who won’t be bothered if it seems inconvenient. Plus if the recycling centers aren’t conveniently located then people will just end up wasting money on gas to get there.

Do you live in a bottle deposit state? If so, are the locations easily accessible and accommodating to most container types and brands?

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Well yesterday I needed to print out a document so I tried to be conservative and decided to print double-sided. Well the printer in my office isn’t very sophisticated so if you want to print double-sided you have to print all of the odd pages first, and then flip them over and print the even ones. But it was a 26-page document so I thought that I would give it a try.
Well I tried to print the 13 odd pages, but nothing happened. Sometimes it takes a while to print from Acrobat so I waited a little while longer. Then I went and futzed with the printer. No dice. So I tried printing again. Nothing. I turned the printer off and then back on, and then tried printing just the first page. Nothing. Checked the print queue. Empty. Then it hit me. I had to use the computer in the lab two days ago because our admin guy was installing some software for me on the machine in my office. And apparently while I was in the lab, Windows (or whatever wonderful software we use to maintain profiles) took the liberty of updating the printer settings in my profile, despite the fact that I hadn’t printed anything. So after a quick walk down the hall to the lab, I found all 27 pages that I had printed. I took them back to my office, reset my printer settings, and printed the even pages. I’m not sure what happened with the last two pages , but they ended up coming out on new sheets of paper.

In the end I wound up with:

• 11 - double-side pages
• 4 - single-sided pages
• 13 - pages from my second print attempt
• 1 - page from my third print attempt

for a total of 29 pages versus the original count of 26. Thanks Microsoft. I can use the extra 14 pages for scrap paper, but it was still a frustrating experience nonetheless. I suppose that I should have checked my printer settings before printing, but I didn’t think that they would be reset because I didn’t print anything. Oh well.

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