Cheryl Burley

Cheryl Burley is the Administrative Assistant for Harvard Real Estate Services’ Project Management group and a fierce recycler. “I started recycling before there were even recycling trucks,” says Cheryl proudly. When she lived in Brockton twenty years ago there was no curb-side pick up and only one drop-off location for recyclables, which made recycling challenging for many in this city of nearly 100,000 people. So Cheryl joined a Saturday morning recycling drop-off at a local junior high school. Each week she and other volunteers would sort the recyclables (no single stream there!) and then deliver carloads to the one recycling center in the city. They did this for several years until curbside pick-up began.

Cheryl brings this same enthusiasm to her work at HRES. She is a charter member of the HRES Green Team and is committed to helping the group achieve Green Office status for its space on the 8^th and 10^th floors of Holyoke Center and the Harvard University Housing Office at 7 Holyoke Street. Before leaving work each day she checks to see that printers and copiers are shut down, curtains are drawn, and that the coffee maker and toaster are turned off. “These things aren’t always as straightforward as they might seem,” muses Cheryl. “When the coffee maker gets turned off in the evening, the first person in has to wait about 20 minutes for it to warm up and brew the first pot of coffee the next day. This was a case of our desire to be sustainable overriding the need for a jolt of java first thing in the morning, so our Green Team got around it by putting the coffee maker on a timer. Now we save energy and meet peoples’ needs.”

Cheryl has found ways big and small to recycle. She worked with Rob Gogan, Harvard’s recycling guru, to set up a place on the 8^th floor of Holyoke Center where staff can drop off batteries, CFL bulbs, printer cartridges, and old cell phones for recycling. She also created a “reuse” drawer on her local printer that contains paper already used on one side. As Cheryl says, “If you’re just printing something for your files, it doesn’t matter if there is something already on the other side.”