Reduce, reuse, recycle: How to recycle away from home

By George Zens

Summer time is festival time, and that also means enormous amounts of trash generated - mainly disposable cups, plates, cutlery, not to mention plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Unfortunately, recycling at festivals is still in its infancy. But while the best solution would be reusable items, recycling works, too.

In the Madison area, we have been used to recycling our household paper, glass, metal and even plastics for some time now. But when it comes to public events, fairs, markets and festivals, the situation is quite different.

Staggering amounts of disposable cups, plates and cutlery are used at those events, and while the best solution would be to stop being so wasteful and start eating and drinking out of reusable containers, with real spoons, forks and knives (and yes, that is possible, as many European countries show), the second-best is to at least recycle what can be recycled.

Unfortunately, public recycling is still in its infancy, even in a region that likes to pride itself on its progressiveness, like the Madison area.

This is where Paul Abramson and his initiative Recycling Away from Home come in. With a large number of dedicated volunteers, he organizes and manages trash collection and recycling at several local events, including the Waterfront Festival, La Fête de Marquette and the Willy Street Fair, all in Madison. He came to an ‘event recycling consultant’ through his love for music festivals and his organizing talent:

“The way it got started is that in some previous careers I have been associated with festivals, volunteer recruitment and technical coordination at musical events for almost my entire life. I generally kike festivals, I like meeting new people, I like being involved, I like music. The Waterfront Festival is two blocks east of my house. I walked over there one day eight years ago to see what it was about. I saw an event that I thought was very cool, a free outdoor party run entirely by people who live in the neighborhood to raise money to support social safety net programs. I thought ‘gee, I could really enjoy getting involved with this’ and then I noticed that the trash was just a horrible mess. I then remembered that the festivals that produced the best memories for me were the ones that were the cleanest and paid the most attention to all the little details.
“So I introduced myself to the person in charge and said ‘I’d like to help you out, but I can’t if the trash is such a mess’. Because, you know, here we are on the enlightened East Side of Madison, where all the great thinking goes on and we’re throwing our trash away, all jamming it in to a 55-gallon Parks Department drum, spilling over, recyclables and regular trash all jammed together. It says ‘we’re not very smart’. And he responded by explaining that they were all volunteers and hadn’t gotten around to focusing on that aspect yet. I took that answer as ‘well, you’re so smart, do something about this’. So even though I w0uld have preferred to continue to be the person who booked bands, sold T-shirts or was on the stage, I took it upon myself to organize the trash.”

An important point for Paul Abramson is the fact that the Waterfront Festival, like most of these events, is run by volunteers:

“These are people like you and me, who get up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning, go down to the park, get everything ready, then work there for ten hours and then at the end of the ten, they would clean up the park until it was too dark to see. Then they get up the next morning and do the same thing again. It’s extremely exhausting. Nobody wants to do the trash – it’s not as sexy as everything else that goes on there.”

So in order to make the operation more efficient and less hard on the volunteers, he developed a different trash management system.

“I wanted to find a way to clean up all day long, so that at the end of the ten hours it would be done. To achieve that I developed the notion that handling the recycling and the trash as a separation process could be handled by an additional team of volunteers who would be brought in specifically for that purpose to relieve the other festival volunteers from having to clean up the park.

Over the years Paul Abramson has learned from his experiences and refined his system. So how does it work?

“We started out with just two or three people, and we were really just putzing around. We had no idea what we were doing, except that we knew what was recyclable based on the curbside recycling program of the city of Madison. Now the system is quite simple compared to how it was at the beginning. At the beginning there was no equipment offered by any industry to separate recyclables. Today we use blue ClearStream recycling collectors, which the city of Madison owns, and loans out for free to anybody who wants them, as long as you reserve them in advance. They are easy to use. And then we also have regular trashcans. Now, the whole system boils down to this: If you put one of these blue collectors that says ‘recycle here’ right next to a regular trash can, that’s called pairing. If you pair every single time you set up a trash can – no exceptions – then it works.”

The reverse is true as well: If regular trash cans and recycling containers are not paired up, then recycling takes a hit. A fine example of how not to do it is the Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Square. Not only are recycling containers and trashcans not paired, but while the recycling containers are visible and easily accessible at corners, the trashcans are hidden behind vendors’ stalls. They are also fixed and can’t be moved. This nonsensical way of trash management is by the way not the fault of the Dane County Farmers’ Market, but the result of redesigning the Square and the general brilliance of our Wisconsin State government.

In contrast, Paul Abramson’s system works because he knows a thing or two about communication and, yes, crowd control.

“People do take direction; crowds can be controlled. Multi-national corporations do this all the time. We hate them for it. Everybody hates being in line at the airport, at theme parks, wherever. But these cordons you go through when you stand in line is crowd control, and you follow it because it’s the easy way to go. That’s similar to what we do with trash and recycling: we offer people the path of least resistance.”
After the trash and the recyclables have been collected, they are picked up either by the city of Madison or private haulers. Larger events require more complex logistics, including dumpsters for regular trash and recyclables.
“They need to be placed so they are easy to get at and you put signs on them.”

Over the years, Recycling Away from Home has established good working relationships with several organizations and institutions, including the Marquette Neighborhood Association, the Four Lakes Sierra Club, Wil-Mar Center, Common Wealth Development, Willy Street Co-op, the Madison Recycling Office and Community Car.

On their website, they also offer suggestions to vendors on how to reduce waste from the beginning.

“It’s all about education,” concludes Paul Abramson.

For more information, please visit:
www.madisonrah.org