This year’s Run Woodstock had it all. Perfect weather, great trail conditions, good live music, lots of food, and hundreds of happy runners. And a good-sized Zero Waste team at the times it mattered most.
Overall waste was just 10 lbs. more than 2022, but it felt like a lot more. Not sure why. But everything was sorted and weighed by around noon Sunday. And our landfill total was the lowest ever for this event. Major kudos to our interns and volunteers for working through all those messy bags, especially the two folks from Zero Waste Chelsea who’d done another event that weekend. Below is Sunday’s team. Great job, everyone!
Here are the highlights from the weekend:
- I’d planned to do the overnight shift at Hog Farm like last year, to better stay on top of the large amount of waste produced there. Two things nixed that plan. One, my Friday intern got sick, so I worked the entire day by myself. And I had to pick up an intern and a volunteer early Saturday morning. So I left Hog Farm to itself after 10 p.m. and thanks to good team effort we caught up on Saturday.
- Like last year, we cut off accepting unsorted camper waste on Sunday morning, directing them to the dumpster in the parking lot. We did accept sorted waste and anything remaining that came directly from the races.
- I narrowly dodged 2021’s mistake of overlooking the final Hog Farm bags. I’d gone out for the Saturday night informal 5K, and on my way back I passed Hog Farm and saw their bags were still there. We picked them up in our trailer and sorted them Sunday morning.
- As there are always things to rinse I brought along some dish soap to mix with water. This allowed us to clean things real-time instead of me taking them home.
- The overall finisher awards were peace signs made from old T-shirts by an RF events staff member! (See the top photo.)
- We ran a contest! People had to guess how many “doo-dads” were in a large jar on the table. We had two co-winners, each 21 away from the actual total of 246. They win gift cards from local businesses. (And all the doo-dads will be recycled, thanks to TerraCycle.)
There were some changes to the food trucks this year. My Little Honey Pot and Little Caesar’s were back, and Kona Ice and Ms. Coffee were new. Ms. Coffee was a last-minute addition and hadn’t heard we were Zero Waste, so she was using Styrofoam cups for hot chocolate. I gave her some compostable cups to use instead. Chris Cakes returned to serve pancakes Saturday morning and BBQ chicken that afternoon. Their bags of trash were unsorted and covered with pancake batter and oil, so I asked them to pack them out.
We made several trips to WWRA to drop off recyclables, as usual, although with our new trailer we managed it with three loads instead of four, and I could wait until the following Monday to drop off all the compostables.
As always, there were some areas for improvement.
- We didn’t set up a station near the food trucks, so the trash can by the porta-potty there filled up with stuff we could have recovered. I collected some of it on Sunday, but had to leave a lot behind. Even an unstaffed station would probably have worked better.
- We could help Chris Cakes sort their waste so we can recover at last some of it.
- Find a way to do more monitoring of Hog Farm. We can also supply them with separate boxes for disposable gloves so we don’t have to fish them out of the other stuff. They did do some sorting, for which we were very grateful on Sunday.
- There was heavy use of waxed cups, many of which required rinsing to make them suitable to recycle. If we can somehow find a way to use all compostable cups, or go to plain paper ones, we’d save a lot of time and effort. (And using fewer cups would be even better.)
None of this spoils what was otherwise a very successful Zero Waste weekend. Peace out!
(This is what the station looks like at night. Just ‘cuz I wanna show it off.)
Happy Planet Running 