New Orleans is heading into the second weekend of Jazz Fest and hundreds of thousands of people are creating a lot of waste. So what are festivals doing to cut back on their trash? Litter-strewn lawns are a common sight at the end of the day during festival season in New Orleans. Emily Madero is trying to change that. She’s the president of French Quarter Festivals Inc. “We love our music festivals, and we love the food and the beverage and enjoying Louisiana culture,” Madero says. “We also recognize with that comes a lot of single use products.”
Plastic products like utensils, cups and bottles. And it adds up – the international non-profit “A Greener Festival” estimates every festival-goer produces about a pound of trash per day. A record 800-thousand people attended French Quarter Fest this year. More people – means more trash. An estimated 400 TONS of it.
Madero knows that’s a problem – so her team launched a recycling program this year. But it came with a hefty price tag for the free festival: $50-thousand dollars. “As a nonprofit that’s a massive fundraising hurdle for something that you know isn’t very sexy to get a sponsorship for, for example.” So Madero says the Festival put out recycling bins, and hired contractors to haul it away. To offset the cost, they sold a reusable go-cup – with discounted beer refills.
The cups were successful – almost 10-thousand were ordered and sold out in two days. The recycling program – not so much. The goal was to divert 40-thousand tons of trash from landfills. In the end, French Quarter Fest estimates only 6 tons – half a garbage truck – of plastics, aluminum and cardboard were collected.