Neither of the sites where I work regularly have recycling capabilities. I've queried multiple times and nothing has materialized. So I'll bring home paper and bottles, but yesterday, I brought home 200 lbs of paper for my bin. It's actually becoming cumbersome cause now I have to store it for at least a week or two in my house as I can't fit it all in my bin. Should I just shine it when there's a huge bolus of recycleables and just recycle the small stuff to ease my guilt at seeing good things being trashed in my office?
There are a lot of recycling companies out there that will provide the disposal containers for them to pick up in the right situation. Since they make money doing this when the situation is right, you may be able to solve this problem with a few phone calls to recycling companies. (Basically, they won't send folks on an expensive trip for just a bucket of cans. They will for a ton of paper.)
At my old company, we had a big bin for cans and plastic bottles. We let one of the workers take the contents with home with him because he had a friend who collected recyclables to make extra money. I attempted to get a recycling container for cardboard, but the cost was too much to make a business case for doing so, and our owner was never willing to do anything that he did not financially benefit from.
My wife does. It's a small office with only a handful of employees and she'll bring home magazines and newspapers to throw into our recycling bin. They went from paper towel rolls to folded, single-dispense paper towels. They were going to toss the existing inventory of rolls. I now have a multi-year supply of paper towels for the garage. I don't have to go out of my way. My company starts with "reduction" and is an aggressive recycler of what's introduced. Since I'm the Co-Chair of our Sustainability Network, it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
I work from home so I recycle. My husband works for Toyota... they recycle. BUT my husband goes to our local recylcing center and gets all their 'puters, monitors, mouses and keyboards. He brings them home, fixes the ones he can and parts out the ones he can't. His office looks like a radio shack. He is the computer repairman for all of our friends and family. All the kids in the family started learning on his computers, that way if they broke them, they didn't ruin an expensive new machine. He'd just wipe the hard drive reinstall Window's if he had a legal copy but more often than not, it was Linux. He just gave his 3 yr old niece a computer. I painted the CPU bright colors for her. She loves it. This reduces the e-waste the solid waste district has to pay to dispose of. My parents own a scrap yard so he takes the metal cases to them and puts the eletronic bits he couldn't use back in the e-waste at the solid waste district. I am friends with the person who runs it and she loves the reduced weight because it's reduced frieght costs to the county. It's nice knowing that we are teaching the kids how to use computers at no cost to their parents and reducing toxic wastes, well, delaying them anyway, in the waste stream. Pretty much everyone my husband considers a friend or who is a family member has benefited from his tinkering. He just does it for the challenge of fixing something someone has thrown out. I could also go on and on about the things he has saved from the junkyard. There was the weedeater some older lady brought in because it stopped working... my husband put gas in it... it runs great! LOL We have fun with the free junk. LOL
I can't believe CA doesn't mandate commercial recycling and won't do so until mid-2012. NJ has been doing it since 1987 (though it was loosely enforced for the first 15-20 years). ETA: To answer the original question: No, my employer has a recycling program (mandated by law, also for ~20 years in PA).
