The 2004 ASUO’s Spring Street Faire boasts about 25 food vendors this year, all of them chopping, frying, grilling, toasting, mixing, sautéing and finally serving up thousands of meals to the delight of community members, University students, faculty and staff.
The Street Faire, which should accumulate much garbage, offers recycling as the only option and dramatically cuts the amount of waste.
“We work with the recycling and garbage facilities, and we have all the garbage cans covered with plastic bags so that you can’t put trash in them, you have to go to a recycling station,” Street Faire Coordinator Diana Aguilar said.
University Recycling Program Manager Karyn Kaplan said the fair offers students the opportunity to recycle many types of materials, including compostables such as food, paper products, and bottles and cans.
Two main recycling stations are located at both ends of the fair, and smaller stations are scattered throughout for convenience to fair-goers, Aguilar said.
“We’ve reduced the wastestream by about 70 percent,” Kaplan said. “It’s an effort towards zero waste, and that can’t be obtained until all materials are compostable.”
The recycling program at the fair was instated by students, Kaplan said. The first “small effort” in 1998 offered only material recycling and successfully
reduced about 40 percent of the fair’s waste. When compostables were added, the waste dropped to the current level.
“Composting is the next horizon,” Kaplan said. “We’ve worked with food vendors to purchase 100 percent paper products.”
Recycling station volunteer sophomore Alice Wessling said the multiple bins at the recycling station tend to sometimes confuse fair-goers, adding that they are still appreciative.
“But that’s why I’m here,” she said. “Everybody says ‘thanks for doing it.’ No one has been negative about it.”
The food vendors, who also produce waste, are bound by strict guidelines and rules, Aguilar said.
“We have two big garbage bins and that’s the only place where the vendors can throw away their garbage and everything else they have to put in recycling,” Aguilar said. “They can’t have any Styrofoam because you just can’t recycle that. They are doing a really good job of complying.”
Doug Ellingson and Yuen Lee, who run the Noodles Delight booth, said the recycling program is a good one, yet is absent at many of the other street fairs they’ve attended.
“They know their process,” Ellingson said. “They give you two buckets; when one gets full they come by and take it away. It’s simple. A lot of things we would normally put into the garbage we can put in there.”
Kaplan said mobilizing the large numbers of volunteers and workers to help the effort is challenging but rewarding.
“It’s a huge effort,” she said. “But it’s really wonderful that we can all do this. It’s a really powerful thing because it’s a community effort.”