One of the goals of the organizers of the Bayou Boogaloo is to work toward having a zero waste festival every year.

While Bayou Boogaloo founder Jared Zeller will be the first to admit that they haven’t yet reached that ambitious goal, just thinking about behaving in an environmentally responsible way has drastically reduced the festival’s overall ecological impact.

The 2013 Bayou Boogaloo crowd. (Photo by Kim Welsh)

“We had eight tons of recycling and six tons of trash last year,” Zeller said. “So by those numbers, we’re not there yet. We want to get to zero, but we have realized over the years that we have some obstacles.”

One interesting obstacle that Zeller hopes they have overcome this year is the availability of recycling containers and their proportion to regular trash cans.

“What we’ve experienced over the years is in order to recycle the proper way at an event like this, you really have to have a recycling receptacle next to every trash can,” he said. “Otherwise it just doesn’t work, and you get contamination.”

If you fight your way through the crowd looking for a recycling opportunity only to find a trash can, Zeller said it’s only human nature to go ahead and throw the potentially recyclable material in the readily accessible trash can. So as an organizer, recycling opportunities have to be as accessible as possible.

“With our partners YLC Recycles and Phoenix Recycling, we were able to obtain enough containers this year for every trash can to have a recycling receptacle right next to it,” Zeller said. “Next to every dumpster there will be a recycling dumpster. Those will be staffed by folks to kind of help the audience pick the right receptacle.”

But this effort came at a cost. Doubling the number of waste containers and dumpsters meant doubling the budget for recycling and waste removal. Zeller sees this as the high cost of being ecologically responsible.

“At a lot of major events, people just do a poor job of managing waste,” he said. “The trash cans are overflowing, or there just aren’t enough of them. We really feel like we’re one of the leaders in the area in terms of having enough receptacles and really trying to educate not only ourselves, but also the public on keeping waste out of the landfills.”

Food vendors are taught about composting and asked to recycle as much as possible, which Zeller said has gone over well with everyone participating. With continued help from festival attendees, partners, and vendors, Zeller hopes to continue reducing the waste produced by Bayou Boogaloo every year.

“I think the better we get as an organization, the more everyone will enjoy it,” he said. “A lot of events seem to think about waste last, but in reality, we need to be thinking about it first. We really had to ask ourselves a lot of questions about how we control the waste, but it is paying off.”