LH Festival Zero Waste featured in the Star-Tribune!

The Zero Waste initiative of the Linden Hills Festival will be featured in Gail Rosenblum's column in tomorrow's Star-Tribune, including a picture of yours truly INSIDE a compost cart! Read the full column here

So how'd we do???

• an estimated 3,5000-4,000 attendees
• 616 ears of corn
• 1160 old fashioned hot dogs
• 100 all-beef hot dogs
• 456 brats
• 105 pizzas
• plus a yet to be calculated amounts of ice cream, cotton candy, popcorn, soda, water, and more!

For the first time ever, we weighed everything at the end...and here's what we ended up with:

• 448.86 pounds of organic material for composting
• 13.16 pounds of plastic bottles for recycling
• 20.78 pounds of recyclable cardboard
• 31.38 pounds of aluminum cans
• 13.12 pounds of glass recycling
• 12.36 pounds of plastic bags and plastic wrap (i.e., these are not recycled through the city of Minneapolis, but through the "It's in the Bag" program)
• 7.08 pounds of other recyclable plastics (i.e., plastics that are recyclable, but not collected by the city - such as plastic caps, coffee cup lids, etc... There are misc programs that collect & recycle these items...Aveda accepts & recycles plastic lids, for example.)

and...drumroll...39.22 pounds of trash. YES...LESS THAN ONE BAG OF TRASH! Seriously!!

A huge thanks to all the disposal station monitors, and especially to super volunteer & true waste warrior, Nancy Lo. She's a rock star.