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2010.11.21

To save money, offices around the U.S. are adding a new chore to their employees' routine: taking out the trash.

Some 20,000 Texas state workers, who once had night janitors empty their desk-side waste baskets, now must tote their own trash and recyclables to common bins. City workers in Phoenix are doing the same, as are employees of some colleges and companies.

'One of the really labor-intensive parts of custodial work is walking to people's desks and emptying the trash,' said Dana Williams, director of facilities services at the Texas Facilities Commission, which manages buildings for more than 100 state agencies. 'And most people only have a fist-sized amount of trash.' By having workers dump their own cans, Texas is expected to save at least $825,000 annually on labor costs -- a tiny piece of a the state's two-year budget of $182 billion.

In addition to the savings on custodial labor, employers expect to save money by reducing the trash they generate, as well as collect more money by producing greater amounts of recycling, one of the program's goals.

State workers in Texas, for example, received small trash bins in addition to larger recycling cans. Some University of Washington workers began emptying their own baskets in a similar program a decade ago as part of an environmental initiative. But with budgets cut 25% over the past two years, Gene Woodard, the school's director of building services, is expanding the program campus-wide.

Mr. Woodard says workers occasionally call him to complain about stinky trash cans they forgot to empty before a vacation. 'Some of these mistakes you do just once,' he said.

When Dartmouth College unveiled its program this summer, the school presented the move as a part of a broader 'sustainability initiative.' Psychology professor Catherine Cramer says she was already recycling all the items the college is targeting.

'The only real change will be that I am expected to haul it to some central place myself instead of having custodial staff pick it up,' she wrote at the time on a school website. 'The real goals here, however prettily wrapped in sustainability rhetoric, are rather obvious.'

Ms. Cramer questions the economics of transferring work from the school's lowest-paid workers to higher-paid employees.

'While I am certainly not above emptying my own trash,' she said, 'it's less clear to me that it's a good use of my professional time, especially to make the frequent trips necessitated by a tiny bucket.'

Linda Snyder, Dartmouth's vice president of Campus Planning and Facilities, says the 'primary goals' of the initiative are to increase campus recycling and reduce waste. Results from the first month show just that. 'Although the program has produced nominal savings on costs such as trash-can liners, its main goal is to improve recycling and sustainability,' she said.