Roosevelt Park in Detroit was full of green on the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day, as over 2,500 people showed up to run a mile or 5K on local roads before enjoying some snacks and beer, and the parade following the race. For the first time in three years, the weather was nice, with reasonably warm temps and a lot less wind. And Happy Planet Running was there once more to keep the race area clean and to recycle and compost as much of the event waste as possible.
Our main station was just after the water and food tents. We covered park trash cans in the immediate vicinity and placed All Waste boxes on them. In the beer area (thankfully closer to the main action this time) we set up a station at the exit and in the middle to collect the beer cups.
Yours truly (Jeff) holding down the fort in a rare quiet moment. The restored Michigan Central Station is in the background.
Applying a lesson from last year, I brought bricks to weigh down the All Waste boxes. Even this wasn’t enough on a couple of occasions, as large wind gusts reminded us it’s still March. But no boxes destroyed like in 2024. And our Zero Waste Station stayed up, too, with appropriate bracing. (No repeats of 2023, thank you. I don’t particularly enjoy signs falling on my head.)
The main source of waste was cardboard (over 500 lbs.) followed by food waste, mostly banana peels, at 177 lbs. Water bottles, waxed cups, and beer cups made up most of the remainder, along with two large bags of plastic wrap. We had to landfill some of the plastic wrap due to contamination from coffee drinks, which added some volume, but we still managed to keep the tradition of a single bag o’ trash (SBoT) and repeated last year’s diversion rate of 99 percent.
Awash in cardboard? No problem, say awesome volunteers Derek and Amber.
The leprechauns awarded us one luck charm: we’d ordered a 10-yard recycling dumpster, like for 2024, but a 20-yarder was delivered instead. A good thing, because the recycling we collected was over twice as much as in previous years. We nearly filled that dumpster.
Just a couple of unexpected twists. Some black trash bags were dropped off at our station as we were closing down. The registration area and vendor tent had collected quite a bit of waste we weren’t aware of, all unsorted. (This was the source of the contaminated plastic wrap.) Also, we could have given a box to the folks taking down the beer fence for collecting cut cable ties, which a couple of us picked up manually during a sweep of the area. (Thanks, Michelle!)
Lesson learned, there can never be too much communication. Everyone involved in the race needs to know about the sustainability effort, and notify us so we can give them bins and police their area during the event.
Also, only about half the beer cups were actually compostable. The rest were standard plastic, and the two streams could not be mingled. Problem was, they looked very similar.
Which of these cups are compostable and which are not? Quick! Empty ones are coming at you from all directions!
Fortunately, the volunteers staffing the waste collection stations in the beer area were up to the challenge. I went through every bag again afterward, but there was minimal cross-contamination. Thanks, and great job, Jim and Wendy!
Thanks to Kurtis Sports Management for keeping this race sustainable for a third consecutive year!
P.S. In the above photo, the compostable cups (#7 PLA) have the black stripe on the bottom. The non-compostables (#1 PET) do not.
Happy Planet Running 