What the Fulton Festival taught me

This past weekend's Fulton Fall Festival was our second year of attempting zero-waste. We collected:

organics: 161.7 pounds
recyclables: 41.9 pounds (cans, bottles, foil and aluminum pans)
trash: 22 pounds

The trash was a lot more than I had hoped, and it drove home an important lesson for me: you have to be involved in the planning stages. I didn't participate in the decision-making when it came to buying supplies for the festival. There were plastic cups for sour cream and butter, yards of plastic table cloths and candy in plastic wrappers. In the pictures below you can see that not much trash was generated *during* the festival; most of the waste came during clean-up, meaning the waste was generated by festival organizers.

Trash from one station ...



and another. And this was toward the end of the festival.



This is our final trash total, after cleanup. See all the orange? That's the table coverings.



I vow to do better next year! The Fulton Festival committee is a great group of people: hard-working and committed, and they want to make the festival low-waste, so I just have to be willing to put in more time on the front end.

About 13 bags of compostables, plus pizza boxes.



Total recycling


Here's another thing I learned: I can't be in two places at once. That and the fact that wind is murder on recycling displays. I set up a couple of recycling displays, but because I was also doing waste-monitoring, my displays were largely unmanned. I'm sad about the missed opportunities to talk to folks.


Everything had to be taped down because it was so windy.


We got to take home leftover corn!

Kitchen trash, week 8

We had much more trash than usual this week!

The tally for Sun., Sept 12:
ramen flavor packet
2 metal crimps from the ends of a sausage roll
sticky tape from a bagel bag
3 zippers
seasoning packet from soup mix
2 mooncake plastic wrappers
more sticky tape
masking tape with too much plastic stuck to it to compost
2 lactose-pill wrappers
cling wrap from cheese
2 blister packs
1 plastic piece that broke off of a pen
1 preservative packet
1 preservative bullet
2 pieces of plastic from necks of bottles
1 plastic wrapper from a Thai fortune roll
1 piece of plastic that broke off of a container we use as a recycling bin
1 piece of plastic that holds the price tag onto a piece of clothing
and 1 piece of foam that covers the top of a pill bottle



Why so much true trash this week? Most of the tape was from the Fulton Festival (more details tomorrow), but other than that, I guess we just had a really trashy week!

Kitchen trash, week 7

Tally for Sunday, Sept. 5:
8 lactose pill wrappers
1 magnet
2 produce stickers
1 blister pack
2 bits of glue (from the garbage pizza)
2 bits of plastic from the neck of an olive oil bottle




Click here for week 1
here for week 2
here for week 3
here for week 4
here for week 5
here for week 6

A pizza you wouldn't want to eat

The Coon Rapids recycling coordinator wanted me to make a garbage pizza to show students the typical composition of municipal solid waste by weight. So using a recipe from Jodi Stumpner of the North St. Paul Environmental Advisory Committee, I mixed 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of salt and 1 cup of water to make dough, then painted it with a mixture of glue and food coloring. Then I gathered the ingredients and glued 'em on. Tasty!


Adding the sauce


It looks real, doesn't it (not)


Gluing on the toppings



Paper makes up the biggest proportion (34.2%), followed by "other" (ie. rubber and wax) at 16.3%, then yard waste (13.1%) and food (11.7%), then plastic (11.9%), then metal (7.6%) and glass (5.2%). Total weight is 209.1 million pounds, and this comes from a 2005 U.S. EPA report "Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste Management Update."


Did someone order The Works?


UPDATE: I found much more updated data from the EPA for 2008. I'll have to see whether Colleen wants a more accurate garbage pizza. I had thought of doing this before I made the 2005 garbage pizza, but did I listen to myself at the time? Nooooo.

UPDATE #2: I redid the "other" section to reflect the EPA's more specific categorization, and the new slices fit in very nicely with the rest of the garbage pie.

The old slice and the new slices. The new slices are broken down into wood (6.6%), rubber, leather and textiles (7.9%) and other (3.3%).


The new, more accurate garbage pizza!

Trashbasher hits the airwaves

I was on Minnesota Public Radio today (!), talking about my struggle to recycle at my former place of employment. Thanks to Eric Ringham and Curtis Gilbert for making me read so well and sound so good!

Curtis in the recording studio

Listen and read here. Note that the audio piece and the written piece are different.

Three happy bits of news

1. Today went really well at Southwest High School; it was the third day of school. Most of the students sorted, and said things like "do it right!" to each other, so that was cool. Even the unmanned disposal stations were mostly sorted, and all the recycling bins we put out actually *contained* recyclables. I feel hopeful that we're going to greatly reduce waste this year, but I'm trying to keep my hopes in check until we're a few months into the school year.

So here's a side benefit to sorting your food waste that they don't tell you about: it's a lot easier to find your retainers. A student came up and told us he'd accidentally thrown them away with his lunch bag, and he only had to dig around in a shallow pile of trash before he found them.

The green bin on the left is one lunch period's worth of food. The red bin contains TWO lunch periods' worth of trash.




2. At a meeting today, Minneapolis Director of Solid Waste and Recycling Susan Young reported that every week her crews are delivering organics and recycling carts to events! It's spreading!!

3. I got this e-mail from Tiger Sushi on Lyndale Ave. (I wrote to them because they were trashing all their glass bottles [they have a BAR in the restaurant, so you can imagine how many hundreds of glass bottles they go through each week] instead of recycling them.)
"Nancy.

Thank you so much for your concerned e-mail. I wanted to let you know right away that we are (happily) switching soon to a new waste mgmt. company that will recycle. We've been tied to the Waste Managment contract used by our landlord --until recently. Now we are switching to a new program that will allow us to recycle ---and also allows us to separate food waste to go to agricultural use.

Thanks so much for your interest.

Warmly,

Lisa Edevold
Owner, Tiger Sushi"

Kitchen trash, week 6

Well, in week 1 I said something like "here's hoping I don't break any large ceramic dishes," and wouldn't you know it, I've broken something ceramic. It's a soup spoon, so it's not very large, but it's still sad.


week 6 tally:
ceramic soup spoon (it's in the upper right corner by the bucket in the picture)
4 blister packs
5 produce stickers
3 pieces of tape
4 zippers
2 foam seals from pill bottles
3 plastic seals from the necks of bottles
13 lactose pill wrappers

Click here for week 1
here for week 2
here for week 3
here for week 4
here for week 5

Getting ready for a new year of school

Sarah and I spent hours at Southwest High School this week setting up disposal stations, signage and making sure every classroom has a recycling bin. We tried to have a short conversation with each teacher, too. Sarah's put a lot of time and legwork into getting Southwest ready for a successful year of recycling and organics composting.





Sarah consulting her map of the school to see which classrooms we still need to hit.

Python's Recycling in St. Cloud

I accompanied the Coon Rapids recycling coordinator and others from Anoka County to Python's Recycling in St. Cloud. The Coon Rapids drop-off recycling center is looking for someone to take their plastics, which prompted our visit. The behind-the-scenes look was very educational, eye-opening and shocking! Their profit margin is very low, in some cases 1 cent per pound, and they often have to sit on materials for months and months waiting to find a buyer.

public drop-off area at Python's

baled aluminum cans

egg cartons

aluminum cans close-up

The sorting line is not for the faint-hearted. In this narrow room, it's very grimy and smelly, and in the summer it's boiling hot and in the winter it's colder than the outside temperatures. The sorters' job is made harder by the fact that the plastics come baled, so pieces will often be interwoven and need to be forcefully pried apart.

Items from the sorting line drop down chutes into this area.

a conveyer belt takes materials into the baler

plastic bottles coming out of the baler

each bale weighs about 800 pounds

plastic bottles

HDPE (#2) plastic bottles

more HDPE bottles


mixed paper waiting for a buyer is exposed to the elements

steel cans

plastic bottles squeezed into wafers!

Green and brown glass bottles

This was the part that shocked me: All these shards and bits are headed for the landfill! This was hard to stomach.

Debris pile headed for the landfill