A big shout put to Diana Hartung and her team at Greenfest solutions for another great Blues festival. Best fest so far in terms of efficiency, organic waste collection and most importantly fun. Here is a summary of our organic waste diversion and experience.
Greenfest Solutions has the Blues Festival Organic Waste recovery was well organised and efficient. Because of this our team was able to get in, out and around the festival quickly and with no hassle. After working with Greenfest and the Blue’s Festival team for a few years now we have come up with a very effective and efficient way of collecting and transporting the green waste. Having the food in clear bags at one location allows us to quickly determine if the degree of contamination is too high for us to take back to the farm. It also allows us to remove more waste from the festival at a time, completing only one trip a day as compared to when we collected bins, which were a lot heavier and didn’t allow us to remove as much organic waste from the festival.
We had a successful year, with an approximate overall amount of 1.9 tons of waste during the festival (Thursday-Monday), and an additional 1.5 tons of organic waste collected Tuesday (post festival). This waste was noted as ‘good’ waste, as it would be consumed by the pigs and chickens.
There was also an additional 800 kg of waste, which included corn husks, citrus and coffee. Although the animals won’t consume this organic waste it will be used for compost and benefit the farm’s plant stock.
This year we also made pamphlets, with a quick summary of what our Farm does to support the Festival and Green Waste, as well as contact information. This showed significant results as we collected large amounts of ‘good’ waste Tuesday (post festival) as a result of food vendors reading the information and contacting us to save their organic waste from landfill. Informing more food vendors and doing what we do best, which is talk to people working at the festival we were able to create more of an awareness for the Green Waste aim.
We will continue with this tactic for further festivals as we saw great results.
The work done through the festival to inform and push for uncontaminated organic waste has been successful, as the contamination has been less than previous years. This makes our festival experience easier and more enjoyable, but there is always room for improvement.
Thank you for a great Blues Fest, and we are looking forward to next year.