Office Environment.

Before arriving in France, I had heard over and over how environmentally conscious and conscientious the French are. Compared to Americans, your average Frenchmen has the carbon footprint of a pre-Industrial Revolution farmer, emitting no chlorofluorocarbons, burning no fossil fuels and wasting not a drop of water. Or so I was told.

Then I got here, enveloped in a smoggy, soot-soaked blanket of American environmental guilt, all ready to integrate myself into this part of their culture, participating in the good fight against the destruction of our planet. For starters, I thought I’d get in the habit of recycling at the office.

Within a week, I had accumulated an impressive stack of superfluous reports, analyses and draft documents, much of which I had inherited from my predecessor, and was thrilled by the idea that I could contribute to the health, harmony and longevity of Mother Earth by recycling them instead of sending them to a landfill.

As I gathered my mass of papers for recycling, I pictured a forest full of wild animals—imposing elk, carefree chipmunks, and even majestic eagles—galloping, scurrying and soaring through nature in peace and tranquility as a direct result of the new life of recycling I was about to embark on. Only one problem—no recycling bin anywhere in sight.

I soon discovered that even the best of environmental intentions can be trumped by the worst of bureaucracy. The entire office building was allowed to produce only a set quantity of recyclable paper that could be collected by the city during any given month, meaning that my office, if it were to participate, could only have about 1% of its recyclables actually recycled each month, so they saw no point in even collecting them.

I have found, however, that my office may not be representative. I have a friend in a similar office who reports that there is a recycling bin beside every copier, printer or fax machine throughout the company, where copious quantities of used paper are collected and then recycled. The one irony, however, is the reporting on that company’s environmental strides. First, there is a monthly chart hung above each recycling bin displaying the amount of recyclables collected throughout the company over the past year. (No word on whether the chart itself actually gets recycled.) Much worse, however, are the environmental awareness reports—numbering anywhere from 50 to 100 pages in length—that are prepared by the company and periodically sent to all employees via email. This means that, in an effort to raise environmental awareness, countless thousands of pages are written on the subject and then printed, briefly skimmed and (hopefully) recycled.

Outside of the office, French environmentalism is equally perplexing. While homeowners and hotel operators spend small fortunes installing water-saving showerheads and other water-saving devices, the city literally cleans the streets by running unknown quantities of clean, fresh water down the gutters to swish garbage, cigarette butts and dog excrement into the sewers. That can’t be efficient, can it?

And yet, the numbers speak for themselves: U.S. per capita greenhouse gas emissions are more than twice those of the French. French cars—even those produced by American companies—are twice as fuel-efficient as cars in the United States. The French consume less than a third as much water and half as much energy as Americans. Somehow, somewhere, the French are doing something very right.

Just not in my office.