Miles of broadcast cable and thousands of sheets of plywood, not to mention balloons and confetti, are just some of the things that will be left over after the Republican National Convention wraps up later this month. And as WKSU’s Kevin Niedermier reports, an environmentally friendly ending is being planned for most of it.
Carpenters and electricians are racing to transform the inside of Quicken Loans Arena from a basketball venue to a political epicenter by Monday. As the stage rises at mid-court, Greg Lane of Freeman, the company that has setting-up Republican National Conventions since 1984, talks about some of what’s going into the transformation.
Lots of Wood Going into the RNC Arena Construction
“We’re probably going to have 2,000, maybe 2,500 sheets of plywood, maybe more than that.”
Lane says after the RNC, most of this plywood will be reused for other conventions Freeman creates. “A lot of it is not nailed in, it’s screwed in so we can take those out and re-purpose that plywood afterwards. There’s certainly some smaller pieces that are custom and stuff, but a small percentage of it, maybe 15 or 20 percent can’t be reused. But we do have some local recyclers that are working with the building and us to take even that and paper products for recycling.”
Finding New Uses
And there will be plenty of left-over paper, and balloons. Dave O’Neil is deputy press secretary for the RNC. “We have about 125,000 balloons that will drop and need to be cleaned up. We have about 1,000 pounds of confetti that will be dropped and need to be cleaned up. All of that material, the paper … for handouts and things of that nature, it won’t simply be thrown away; it will be recycled.”
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