Lots of things come to mind when you consider what the city’s Carnival tradition has produced: clever costumes, spectacular floats and the Mardi Gras Mambo, to name a few. Then there’s the tons of garbage — up to 2.6 million pounds each year in New Orleans alone, from plastic beads to Popeyes containers. This year, city officials, nonprofits and a handful of Carnival crews are teaming up to put a dent in that enormously wasteful problem. The efforts range from launching a pilot program encouraging paradegoers to recycle — called Recycle Dat — to throwing more sustainable beads and trinkets from floats.
Any change will certainly help. Consider what happened in 2018, when 93,000 pounds of beads were found across five blocks in New Orleans’ drainage system. Not ideal for a famously flood-prone city.“Everyone hearing about it is like, ‘How can I help?'” said Anna Nguyen, spokesperson for the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, which is overseeing the pilot program alongside the city’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability and New Orleans & Company. “Because (Recycle Dat) can’t just rely on the city. It’s a community effort as well.”
The Arc of Greater New Orleans, which provides jobs to intellectually and developmentally disabled people, collects beads in recycling bins across the city year-round and repurposes them for future celebrations. The group has collaborated with the nonprofit Grounds Krewe, a volunteer-focused project created by Brett Davis in 2017, to provide recycling for events. “Mardi Gras is our highest profile event. The fact that it produces up to 2.6 million pounds of waste just in 11 days means there’s a lot of work we could be doing to improve the image of Carnival season,” said Davis.