Zero Waste Committee

Zero Wasting events in Rochester, NY 

Written by Zero Waste chair FrankRegan@RochesterEnvironment.com May 4, 2013

Rochester, NY has a lot of outdoor events, especially in the summer.  It’s one thing to make these events recycling events, where your guests feel good about their environmental footprint.  It’s a step beyond to make your event Zero Waste.  That means hundreds, maybe thousands, of folks come to your event and leave with little impact on our environment. Food, plates, silverware, packaging, wrappers, drinking cups, and all those tasty ingestibles and their accouterments we bring to bear on special occasions get sorted, recycled, or composted. 

Properly speaking, zero waste is where you design products so that the end-of-pipe diversion gets transformed; it is a system designed with environmental health in mind from the very start-- "cradle to cradle."  But until we reach that sustainable Holy Grail, we can design our consumption-intensive events as environmentally friendly as possible.  

It takes a little more planning than the business-as-usual way of creating events, where you call up all sorts of vendors who bring stuff to your event and then hire a single trash hauler to take it away to who-knows-where.  A Zero Waste event requires that you get everyone, especially the event planners and coordinators, on board with thinking environmentally. Without this vision thing, it won’t work.  If the key players come to the table kicking and screaming about all the extra trouble this will make, it’ll be a dud.  (In the future, if we’re lucky enough to have one after a couple of centuries of seriously trashing and warming* our planet, environmentally friendly events will be the norm.)

First off, to even approach zero waste, you’ll need to start planning early.  You’ll need a recycling company, a waste company, a composing company, vendors with recyclable containers, lots of bins, lots of signs (to direct and educate the public), and lots of volunteers to help instruct your guests where to place waste properly.  It sounds a bit much, but check out this guide from the great state of Connecticut: “An inside guide to event recycling.” Each region will be different depending on how dedicated businesses, government, and the public are to maintaining a healthy environment--and what the recycling market is like.  

Some events in our Rochester region that have gone nearly Zero Waste are the annual Greentopia and Ganondagan Festivals.  There are probably more.  Presently, our Rochester Sierra Club’s Zero Waste Committee and a local enterprise dedicated to sustainability called Epiphergy are helping to make the Rochester Tour De Cure event on June 2^nd a zero waste event.  Zero Waste always looks good on your event.

I’m not going to rhapsodize much on the value of making your event as environmentally friendly as possible—except to say that much of our trash is toxic to our children, and improperly dealing with trash will make adapting and mitigating Climate Change more problematic.  Not to mention, landfills are really, really bad for our environment:

“Landfills are the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the U.S., and the impact of landfill emissions in the short term is grossly underestimated — methane is 72 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year time frame.” (Page 7, Stop Trashing the Climate)

Key to a healthy climate of zero waste events is a political and business environment that has the incentive and desire to help make our region’s events trash free.  Without easy access to recycling services (i.e., hauling and sorting), it will be more difficult to orchestrate all the elements needed to make our events zero waste. 

It’s also crucial that the local media keep a keen eye on how recycling is actually being accomplished.  For example, The Investigative Post in the Buffalo region holds its leaders and institutions accountable for increasing the recycling rate: Housing authority ignores recycling mandate.

It’s easy at this point in time, where environmental concerns are thought to be external to our existence, to create events that throw all trash into a single stream and create the illusion that everything is being taken care of properly.  More difficult is steering this great wasteful system of ours towards a more sustainable path, where environmental knowledge rules over political, business, and social convenience.

* As of this writing, the Carbon Dioxide on our atmosphere is passing 400 parts per million. “The speed at which Earth’s atmosphere has reached that density of carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas, has scientists alarmed.”(Earth's greenhouse gas levels approach 400-ppm milestone  (May 1, 2013) LA Times)

   

Please help us staff recycling stations at Rochester Tour De Cure, June 2nd

Our Rochester Sierra Club Zero Waste committee is taking a big leap in trying to get local events to be nearly zero waste—with the help of Epiphergy. We need your help to make this Sunday, June 2^nd a success and raise public awareness about the importance of reducing waste during Rochester’s many events.

Please let Dave Goldman [ dhgdeals@aol.com ] know that you can help out for 3 hours, then fill out the Tour De Cure form, as explained before.  Dave Goldman is collecting names in order to keep our tables staffed, and the Tour De Cure form is to make sure you get a free T-shirt and food during the event. 

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Join the Rochester Sierra Club's Zero Waste Community on the Action Network.

The Activist Network is a vibrant community where Sierra Club activists and supporters can work together to get things done. Online and offline. Whether it's cleaning up streams, protecting endangered species, getting wilderness designation, ending commercial logging in national forests, or getting to zero waste, the Activist Network is the place where you can collaborate with others to accomplish your goals. Some of the things you'll be able to do:

1. Upload documents, like pdfs, powerpoints, word docs and create a searchable resource library for your team.

2. Collaboratively brainstorm, create, and edit documents like factsheets, workplan, agenda, minutes, scripts, press releases.

3. Promote events.

4. Create and promote opportunities for volunteers to get involved.

5. Keep a private space for agenda, minutes, private team business.

6. Work online while you're on a conference call.

7. Make decisions.

8. Invite people to join your team or project or brainstorm.

9. Ask for feedback and suggestions.

Please consider signing up to our group and joining in our efforts by entering your e-mail in the Google Groups box below. We discuss, story files, information and resources on our how best to recycle in the Rochester area.

Rochester Sierra Club Zero Waste | Google Groups

Subscribe to Rochester Sierra Club Zero Waste

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This short online video gets at the heart of Zero Waste:  

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Resources

• Zero Waste Committee Main Page Sierra Club Welcome to the new recycling movement for the 21st Century and to the work of the new Zero Waste Committee! Zero Waste is a design principle for the 21st century; Producer Responsibility Recycling is the means for achieving a deep transformation of wasteful production and consumption. We aim to lead the transition from traditional end-of-pipe waste "diversion" programs provided by local governments to "cradle to cradle" recycling systems designed, financed, and managed by producers, in order to drive improvements in product design, stimulate local economies and reduce climate change impacts of transportation- and energy-intensive product chains. Phasing out landfilling and incinerating discarded resources is prerequisite to Zero Waste; hence the committee also coordinates Club work on waste disposal issues.    

• The Sierra Club's policy for reducing waste is based on Zero Waste.  

• RochesterEnvironment.com's Recycle page: Recycling Rochester | Recycle everything | Rochester news | RochesterEnvironment.com  

• Our Zero Waste (Or Pretty Darn Close) program with Chris Burger on November 6th, 2008.  

• Earth Resource Foundation (ERF) Founded in 1999, Earth Resource Foundation (ERF) is an environmental educational non-profit organization developed to empower the general public with the resources needed to make environmentally sustainable choices and changes.

• Activist Network Home - Conservation - Clubhouse - Sierra Club

• New Yorkers for Zero Waste Platform 2010 "The N.Y.S. Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has prepared a new State Solid Waste Plan that finally recognizes that materials in our waste stream are valuable and need to be preserved. We strongly endorse its preference for waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting over disposal. The less waste we dispose of the more environmental, economic and social benefits that we will enjoy.    Unfortunately millions of tons of garbage are still being wasted by being sent for disposal in landfills or incinerators.  The DEC estimates New York’s recycling rate to be only 20%, far short of the 50% reduction and recycling goal to be met by 1997 under the State Solid Waste Management Act of 1988. A large portion of waste headed for disposal is recyclable (50%) or compostable (30%) material that could be processed by other means into new products. "        

• Environmental Services | Monroe County, NY "Recycling in Monroe County—The “Blue Box” Program The following containers, paper materials and license plates (defaced) should be placed in your recycling box and taken to the curb before 6:30 a.m. on your regular trash collection day. Click here to download a recycling guide."

• What is the relationship between trash and Climate Change? Or, why do we need to recycle? What is the concept of Zero Waste and why should we strive towards it? This is all explained in a wonderfully clear document “Stop Trashing the Climate.” Check this out: Stop Trashing the Climate "Stop Trashing the Climate provides compelling evidence that preventing waste and expanding reuse, recycling, and composting programs — that is, aiming for zero waste — is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective strategies available for combating climate change. This report documents the link between climate change and unsustainable patterns of consumption and wasting, dispels myths about the climate benefits of landfill gas recovery and waste incineration, outlines policies needed to effect change, and offers a roadmap for how to significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within a short period. "