Our green holiday party! Walking the walk...not just talking the talk.

Our annual holiday party had a decidedly 'green' flavor last night. While not entirely ZERO WASTE, there was much less 'trash' produced than in previous years, with just a little additional effort or cost. We had 100+ friends, including adults & kids, with a buffet of food. Some of the small changes this year included:

• Set up 'disposal stations' with collection bins for compostables, glass (beer bottles), plastic (i.e., water bottles), and trash.
• Used compostable plates (Chinet dessert plates) and compostable cups. Paper hot cups for the hot cider, and corn-based "PLA plastic" cups for punch and wine. The corn cups were printed with a green stripe indicating that they were made from corn and compostable, so folks knew that they were not regular plastic cups!
• Did NOT have chocolate kisses as in past years, due to the non-compostable foil wrappers.
• We did use plastic utensils, but we collected and washed them, rather than throw them away. (Using corn-based utensils would have been another option, but we had leftovers from buying in bulk for last year's party.)
• Collected bottlecaps (instead of throwing in garbage as in the past) since I just learned at the EcoParents meeting that bottlecaps can go with the metal recycling collected curbside!
• Purchased food in bulk at Costco (where possible) to reduce packaging waste (e.g., big bags of Goldfish crackers and Pirate booty)
  

And of course, we put the beer boxes with the organic recycling NOT the boxboard recycling since those have the wet strength additive. :-)

Our little green organics carts is overflowing! And the big black garbage bin has only one big bag from the party. And an added bonus - lots of our non-Linden Hills friends asked about the organics collection and expressed a desire to have that in their neighborhood as well! The corn-based cups were definitely a big conversation starter.

More to come about green parties later this year, as we will be asking for EcoParent volunteers to host green parties with non-EcoParent friends to help spread the word! (That was part of the original grant proposal plan...)

It was a lot of fun and very satisfying to host our annual party with a much lighter footprint!