Still Greening After All These Years

Over thirty years passed before I returned to my interest in things green (see Power 2 the Pupils). I started volunteering to help “divert” the trash at big local events like Kaboom (a fireworks show sponsored by a local radio station) and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (HSB is a free music festival in Golden Gate Park that attracts around half a million people over three days.) I ran into Mary Munat at the first HSB I worked as a volunteer and she hired me to work for her company, GreenMary, doing similar events all over Northern California. Every year it’s gotten bigger with more events. I don’t have a car so I’m limited to working the events I can get to on public transit (or by walking for the events in the heart of San Francisco), but that includes everything in SF plus the ones in Oakland and Berkeley and even the occasional event in San Mateo county.

The work has changed in the past year or so as we’ve developed better methods, but basically we make sure as much of the waste at an event goes to compost and recycling and as little goes to landfill as possible. Sometimes we monitor stations and help people put their trash in the correct bins, but more frequently we sort what gets tossed. We used to work in teams around tables opening bags of trash and sorting the contents into the right dumpsters. We still do this on occasion. That sounds simple enough, but we are sometimes talking about hundreds of bags of mostly food and the occasional diaper (I think the record for most diapers in a bag is still seven). And the sorted trash goes into these huge metal containers called debris boxes. Mostly we use the ones that contain 20-30 cubic yards of waste and too often the event orders too few debris boxes so we have to pack everything down so it fits. Pretty much all you can do with recycling is flatten the boxes, but with compost you can cover the top with cardboard and jump on it to smash the waste down. It’s idiotic but we have to do it all the time.

There’s another good thing about this work: It gets me out to many of the interesting events in the area which I would normally never attend. We work the Maker Faire; both the Cherry Blossom Festival and the J-Pop festivals in Japantown; the How Weird festival (Burning Man people); Pink Saturday (part of the Gay Pride celebration); the Dragon Boat Race Festival on Treasure Island; the Kite Festival at the Berkeley Marina; Oakland’s Art & Soul, Temescal, and Eat Real Festivals. We usually work several other free concerts in Golden Gate Park besides the massive HSB; in 2012 we worked the U.S. Open Golf Tournament and the America’s Cup preliminaries. We occasionally work corporate conventions (my least favorite work, though I did learn about Cloud computing, my current passion, at a VMWorld convention). Oracle OpenWorld has turned into a music festival and we end up doing many of their concerts. I haven’t mentioned all the tiny events but some of them are also quite interesting in their own way. I can safely say I would not have seen any of this if not for the greening work.