Do You Know What The Dirtiest Job On Bridge Day Is?
Question: What separates garbage from recyclable materials?
Answer: The Fayette County Green Advisory Team (GREAT), a group of concerned citizens who would like to see a more sustainable West Virginia economically, environmentally, and socially. And what better place to spread that message than Bridge Day?
GREAT is a relatively young organization; we’ve been around since 2005. With our new non-profit status we’ll be making some big moves in the years to come, which is right where Bridge Day comes in.
We’re going to do all we can to lower the environmental impact of West Virginia’s biggest one day festival, because 80,00 people are expected to walk across the New River Gorge Bridge for the 30th anniversary of Bridge Day. All that traffic creates a lot of garbage.
How much? WV Department of Highways places 103 trash cans along the bridge and has 25 WV Department of Highways employees that continually empty the cans of everything that Bridge Day goers will be throwing away during the 6 hour celebration, but all that trash doesn’t go away. After the Bridge Day celebration that garbage is loaded into trucks and hauled over to Raleigh County to be buried in the landfill. Last year we generated over 6 tons of waste in 6 hours.
To us, it makes sense to get all of the aluminum, paper, and plastic out of those 6 tons of trash and turned into some income for West Virginia. GREAT has requested funding for 103 recycling bins for Bridge Day 2010, but for this year’s events we’re scrounging up all the recycling bins and volunteers we can find.
It’s gonna be a strong willed, grass roots, down and dirty effort, and it won’t be easy (and when I say “down and dirty”, I mean it). But it will be worth it…
O.K., hold your nose- this is what we’re going to do:
In order to better the Bridge Day Recycling Project for 2010, the Green Advisory Team will be picking through 30 bags of Bridge Day Trash in order see what the Bridge Day waste stream looks like. Basically we’re gonna see exactly what festival goers are throwing away.
We understand if no one wants to volunteer for this part of our recycling project, and that’s fine because we will also have a GREAT informational booth that will need a few folks willing to spread the word about Waste Reduction, Energy Efficiency, and Water Conservation.
If you’d like to volunteer some of your time to the Fayette County Green Advisory Team on Bridge Day, email info@greenwv.org.
Check out the official webpage for Bridge Day 2010.
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Volunteers are currently working on a project to help “green” Bridge Day. We are asking GREAT volunteers, community members, and anyone with GREAT ideas to post their ideas to green Bridge Day as a comment on this page.
Let’s start the ideas flowing. Last night we discussed the following ideas:
Recycling and Composting
This is the most obvious and probably the most important task we can accomplish for Bridge Day. Setting up recycling bins and compost bins for Bridge Day would be a great step towards making the festival more environmentally friendly. How about weighing the amount of recyclable or compostable material that we save from going to the dump?
Using Biodegradable Serving Materials
Can we ask vendors to use biodegradable material? How about banning the use of Styrofoam? It is cheap to buy but pretty much indestructible in a landfill.
Eliminating Water Bottles
How about replacing bottled water with water coolers set up with biodegradable cups? Maybe we can get local businesses to sponsor water coolers and cups to give water away?
Post your ideas as a comment below.
Love the water cooler and cups idea instead of plastic water bottles. Would the CVB buy the coolers and cups? Wouldn’t it be great if it was cheaper to buy the equivalent amont of water and cups and coolers to the plastic bottles. hil
Do you have the information on costs of the coolers?
I don’t think we have pricing on the coolers yet- I believe this is something we are striving to have for Bridge Day 2010.
Let’s try and connect the composting bin idea with the new community gardens organized by the Master Gardener’s in Fayetteville. It’d be great to see all that trash turned into a useful product and kept in Fayetteville. Next time I see a Master Gardener I’ll bring it up and to the other two readers here, please do the same or tell them to contact me!
Thomas and I talked more about having an energy contest where people could sign up at Bridge Day. They would be required to keep their energy bills for a set amount of time (3 or 6 months) starting the month prior (Sept – to ensure no one jacks up there usage in order to cheat). Whatever family has lowered their energy usage the most (percentage wise) will win a prize. Maybe we can get Lowes or another local company to donate an energy star dishwasher or other appliance.