Reducing landfill waste at events.

Event attendees generate more waste during the day than someone working from home or in an office. Most of this waste ends up in the landfill because waste management is not typically an item on the event planners checklist, but it needs to be.

Food waste is the single largest category of material placed in city landfills. There, it creates methane as it breaks down, and believe it or not methane is more potent in our atmosphere than CO2. When food is composted properly it produces way less methane.

Many venues do not offer composting as part of their waste management program, for a variety of reasons. The venue where I used to work had a composting program available but it was for food scraps only and did not allow any compostable serving materials to enter the waste stream. This created a problem because we did not have the people power (at a 600 person event) to separate out everyone’s food from the containers they were in before going into the bins. So unfortunately, everything went to landfill. The city has since upgraded its composting program, but before that happened we ended up using a third-party composting service to drop off bins and retrieve them post-event. And surprisingly it was not that expensive to do so.

By utilizing this service, we were able to throw literally everything from our meals into the compost bins. The food, containers, napkins, utensils, and coffee/drink cups. Everything we purchased to serve food in was BPI Certified compostable materials and not one item went to the landfill.

You can also avoid single use plastic by replacing water bottles with aluminum, or offering aluminum or compostable drinking cups and water bubblers. Aluminum items have a ridiculously higher recycling rate than plastic, however aluminum production produces greater emissions than plastic. It’s a trade off but personally I think aluminum is better for the time being, because once plastic is sitting in a landfill it creates a whole new set of problems. I think the best option is finding unique ways to encourage guests to bring their own re-usable bottles! Because it is inevitable that if you offer plastic bottles they will end up in the landfill. And if they do make their way to the recycling bin there’s only a 5% chance it’s going to be properly recycled into a new water bottle.

And that’s it. It’s not hard to divert waste from the landfill if you just create a plan in advance!