The "Greening' of Our Parish Picnic

Why don't we have a "no trash" picnic? That didn't fly! It was the planning meeting for the annual parish picnic and about 24 people had gathered in the parish hall eager to plan what they would cook and who would volunteer for which committee. No one volunteered for the Green Committee. It wasn't what had been done before.

So we decided to do a demo. We would set up a trash recycling center and have all trash sorted. It worked! We actually sorted more than was needed but we wanted to measure all the different types of trash that was made at the event. You can see the different types in the video.

The week before a news clip was aired on the local TV.....Fort Myers Recycling to be Burned! Great, we were trying to make a point about recycling, about reducing the trash. As it turned out, the County takes all the trash collected by all the cities. It is building a new single stream recycling center to open in October where all recyclables will be sorted. Sorting won't be necessary. Meanwhile, our city of Fort Myers needed to buy it's new trucks and chose to purchase the single stream trucks, trucks that would pick up all recyclables without sorting them. It was a wise move since the other trucks would be out of date when the new recycling center opened. So between now and Oct. 1, the recyclables that have not been sorted will go to the waste to energy incinerator to be burned. At least it will make energy. We chose to haul our recyclables out to the center so they could be used again.

Here's the trash that was created by the picnic with 200 people attending:

50 Gallons of plastic bottles (recyclable)

6 glass bottles (recyclable)

12 aluminum drink cans (recyclable)

10 gallons of food scraps (we are attempting to compost)

20 gallons of paper plates (not recyclable because they were contaminated with food)

2 gallons of plastic ware (advertised as recyclable but our local system cannot recycle it)

31 drink pouches (recyclable)

1 gallon of styrofoam (not recyclable)

30 gallons of soiled paper napkins (we will try to compost with the food scraps)

1 gallon of paper and cardboard (recyclable)

25 gallons of aluminum (recyclable)

30 gallons of plastic wrap (not recyclable)

We did pretty well. Many folks brought their own reusable cups. When everything was sorted out it didn't look like we had very much.

Next year we may have a "no trash" picnic.

Thanks to everyone who worked to make our picnic "green". It was a fun time!