UPDATE / February 27, 2024:
Krewe of Freret banishes plastic beads for its parades beginning in 2025

Although the Krewe of Freret has spent 10 years debating its environmental influence, the purpose hit house early final month, when members had hassle reaching the krewe’s “Shorty Gras” live performance on account of flooding.

The Sewerage & Water Board attributed the chaotic flooding of that night, February 3, to the “gutter buddies” meant to dam plastic beads from catch basins alongside parade routes. However the SWB’s well-intended gutter boundaries, together with discarded throws, ended up additionally blocking heavy rainfall from the storm drains alongside St. Charles Avenue, inundating areas that didn’t sometimes flood.

Inside a number of weeks, Krewe of Freret board members voted unanimously to ban plastic beads in its parades, beginning in 2025.  

“I assumed it was absurd that plastic beads contributed to the flooding,” mentioned Bobby Hjortsberg, captain of the Krewe of Freret. “Our group ought to cease contributing to that.”

Even beneath blue skies, Hjortsberg questioned the protection of the throws, after plastic beads stained the neck of his one-year-old daughter. Public-health officers have cautioned mother and father concerning the hazard of the mass-produced plastic beads (for extra particulars, see full story beneath, which was initially revealed on February 22, 2024). 

Freret’s determination, affecting simply over 1,000 krewe members, is a blip on the radar in comparison with different, bigger parades, Hjortsberg mentioned. Nonetheless, all of it provides up: over the following 10 years, the choice might stop greater than 301,750 kilos of poisonous beads from getting into the New Orleans ecosystem, based on krewe calculations.

“We’re already seeing a significant shift within the psyche of the trendy parade-goer,” mentioned the native efficiency artist-producer Boyfriend, who acts as Freret’s new sustainability advisor. “Low cost plastic beads wind up on the bottom or in storm drains, make their method into our water-table, leeching harmful chemical substances, and are packaged in extreme quantities of single-use plastic that blows off the floats and winds up everywhere in the streets.”

WITHOUT GARBAGE TRUCKS, St. Charles Avenue couldn’t come to life throughout Carnival.

A day of parades go away the road and impartial floor awash with trash. Road-cleaning crews carrying brooms and wheeling trash bins work into the evening to clear the best way for morning visitors on the avenue.

There’s a cadence to the work. Sweep, dump, bag. No sorting. Trash vehicles heavy with beads, cans and throws tip their hundreds throughout the Mississippi River, on the River Birch Landfill. 

It’s environment friendly. No want for revelers to seek for the closest trash bin. Any cans dropped onto the road will probably be scooped up. Till 2003, town would trumpet the quantity of trash collected as one of many metrics of Carnival’s success. 

However some observers have come to look upon the mass waste with disgust. “It’s solely throughout the final couple of years that town of New Orleans and the native tourism bureau, New Orleans & Firm, have acknowledged the large stigma concerned with Mardi Gras, the waste it creates and the way guests really feel about it,” mentioned New Orleans native Brett Davis, who based Grounds Krewe, a nonprofit to sort out Carnival waste, town’s distinctive downside.

In 2018, Grounds Krewe began as a single recycling station close to the Napoleon Avenue intersection. Final yr, with the launch of town’s Recycle Dat! initiative, six recycling hubs appeared alongside St. Charles, every run by a distinct non-profit and staffed by paid staff, making $25 to $30 an hour, to gather recyclables and educate the Mardi Gras revelers about what can and can’t be recycled.

This yr, collections elevated steeply. Carnival 2024 totals present that Recycle Dat! companions greater than tripled their assortment of aluminum, from 1,475 kilos to 4,564 kilos – greater than 150,000 cans – diverted from the landfill and dropped at EMR Metallic Recycling. Glass, too, practically tripled, from 1,500 to 4,288 kilos. Recycled beads and throws elevated barely, from 11,535 to 12,729 kilos.

The will increase got here due to an exponential leap in funding, from town and native sponsors, together with a brand new partnership with a worldwide group’s United States chapter, Each Can Counts U.S., which was launched this yr by the Can Producers Institute, a nationwide commerce affiliation to advertise the “infinite recyclability” of aluminum.

(Plastic should be downcycled to a lower-quality product, and most frequently can solely be recycled as soon as earlier than turning into too degraded and poisonous. However aluminum can be utilized repeatedly to make new aluminum cans.)

Up to now, the St. Charles hubs have operated solely throughout the weekend daytime parades, to guard volunteers who stroll the route amassing cans, Davis mentioned. However in coming years, hours might develop, relying on momentum from two new pilot packages that launched this yr.

The primary pilot was a “can sweep” on Sunday, Feb. 4, throughout the first full weekend of Uptown parades. After that day’s final parade, the Krewe of King Arthur, town’s sanitation division briefly held again its crews to permit a workforce of 12 paid staff to stroll the parade route, plucking aluminum cans left behind on the road and in trash piles.

Masking a span of 10 blocks – lower than 1 / 4 of your complete route – they collected 289 kilos of littered aluminum – roughly 9,768 cans. Davis deemed it “an enormous success.” To him, it additionally proved a degree, in a metropolis the place lower than 2% of residential waste is recycled, based on the trade publication Waste Dive. “We needed to point out town of New Orleans that not every little thing has to go proper right into a dump truck and right into a landfill.”

The second pilot got here 5 days earlier than Mardi Gras, on Muses Thursday, when Grounds Krewe and companions arrange unmanned aluminum can recycling bins subsequent to extra conventional trash cans destined for the landfill. This marked the primary time that unmonitored recycling bins had been made out there alongside the Uptown parade route. 

After that evening’s three parades, the Recycle Dat! coalition picked up the brand new recycling bins, amassing 609 kilos of aluminum – greater than 20,000 cans in a single evening.

As soon as the aluminum was offered to EMR Metallic Recycling at market charge, Each Can Counts U.S. labored with the Recycle Dat! initiative to double the income generated. Collected cans taken for recycling returned $3,269. This income will probably be divided in thirds in order that three native charities obtain donations of simply over $1,000 every.

The three charities to obtain these donations are the Pontchartrain Conservancy, which works to protect and restore the Lake Pontchartrain Basin; Zeus’ Rescues, which works to eradicate pet homelessness and euthanasia inside New Orleans; and NOLA Cans 4 Meals, which makes use of aluminum recycling income to prepare dinner meals for town’s group fridges.

At Concord Circle (previously Lee Circle), NOLA Cans 4 Meals managed a recycling hub led by Kina Carney, an educator who was new to recycling advocacy when she signed up. She left with hopes of kickstarting recycling entry close to her Ninth Ward house. “I’m all the time crying and crumbling on the within about how a lot plastic and issues like that go to waste,” she mentioned.

The Truths Behind Plastic ‘Recycling’

The place St. Charles intersects with St. Andrew, the Osprey Initiative, a Gulf Coast-based litter consulting and clean-up agency, managed a Recycle Dat! recycling hub. The hubs collected 240 kilos of plastic, greater than 6,000 plastic bottles.

These plastic bottles will probably be taken by truck to a recycling facility run by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Atmore, Ala. The plastic will probably be sorted and processed by Indorama Company and in the end formed into recycled Coca-Cola bottles.

However recycling plastic shouldn’t be as efficient or sustainable as recycling aluminum and glass. Greater than 99% of plastics are produced from fossil fuels and the overwhelming majority can’t be recycled. Throughout the nation, as of 2021, solely 5% of plastics are recycled. That’s opposite to messaging from firms like Exxon Mobil. 

A latest report from the Heart for Local weather Integrity concluded that oil and gasoline firms have spent the previous couple of a long time deceptive the general public concerning the recyclability of plastics. 

Plastic Mardi Gras beads are primarily sourced from China and are imported to the Gulf Coast yearly by the tens of thousands and thousands of kilos. However they’re not often constructed from new plastic. 

As an alternative, the plastics in these beads are sometimes downcycled from electronic-waste plastic, which first housed units like computer systems and telephones and are infused with flame-retardant chemical substances. The Ecology Heart estimates that most of the poisonous chemical substances in Mardi Gras beads come from this e-waste recycling course of. In consequence, the colourful plastic strings typically include lead, heavy metals and different supplies that may be poisonous to people—kids particularly. 

Research have additionally discovered elevated ranges of lead within the soils of New Orleans alongside the parade routes, from a long time of thrown beads together with the residual lead that strains many roadways from the times when auto gasoline contained lead. The Louisiana Division of Well being has suggested that, to forestall kids from ingesting lead, mother and father ought to take precautions resembling utilizing hand wipes whereas attending parades, washing any beads picked up from the road and altering a toddler’s garments promptly after they’ve been uncovered to filth on the routes.

On Mardi Gras day, members of RISE St. James, a corporation opposing the development of a brand new virgin plastic manufacturing advanced in St. James Parish, rode some floats within the Krewe of Zulu, to throw postcards linked to petitions, alongside the parade’s iconic coconuts.

Final yr, throughout Carnival 2023, 2.5 million kilos of waste had been dropped at the landfill in simply 11 days. 1 / 4 of this waste was plastic beads. (Breakdowns weren’t available for 2024.)

RISE St. James is making an attempt to attract consideration to the waste, to attract consideration to the environmental hurt created by plastic manufacturing and those that finance it. Their petitions name out the funding of Citibank, a Fortune 500 firm, in a large petrochemical advanced deliberate for the small city of Welcome, La., in St. James Parish.

Every postcard included a hyperlink to the group’s petition, which calls on Citibank to divest, defund and denounce the $12 billion “Sunshine Undertaking” that will use fossil fuels to create virgin plastic.

On Sunday Feb. 18, 5 days after Fats Tuesday, RISE St. James despatched a letter to Mayor LaToya Cantrell asking her to handle the environmental influence of Mardi Gras, focusing significantly on the “extreme use of plastic beads.” 

Sharon Lavigne, founder and director of RISE St. James, wrote, “I respectfully urge you to think about establishing an environmental sustainability committee devoted to addressing plastic utilization in our Mardi Gras celebrations.”

From Carnival Glass to Coastal Sand

Whereas glass bottles aren’t technically allowed alongside the parade route, they nonetheless find yourself within the waste that’s left alongside St. Charles Avenue that’s trucked to the River Birch Landfill.

Glass Half Full, one of many companions of the Recycle Dat! initiative, was based in 2020 by Tulane college students who had observed the dearth of glass-recycling amenities in New Orleans. The non-profit collects glass “waste” from residents throughout Louisiana and pulverizes it with hammer-mill crushers to create sand and gravel.

The pulverizing takes place on Louisa Road and is sifted to take away labels and different residue which will have been left on the glass. The particles are then sorted into merchandise that vary from tremendous smooth, beach-like powdered sand to chunky glass gravel. 

The chunkier gravel sometimes goes to building tasks or is became jewellery by native artisans, whereas 60% % of the pulverized glass is donated to coastal restoration tasks as sand, mentioned Franziska Trautmann, co-founder and CEO of Glass Half Full. 

In some methods, it’s returning glass to its origins: glass is made by super-heating quartz sand till it melts.

The worldwide sand trade is dealing with a scarcity. All over the world, sand is being depleted at an alarming charge, by exploitative extraction practices resembling dredging and mining. In southern Louisiana, dredging has contributed to the erosion of the state’s shoreline and wetlands.

Restoring Louisiana’s shoreline would require a whole lot of 1000’s of cubic yards of sand, Trautmann mentioned. However Glass Half Full has a twin mission: to combat coastal erosion with recycled sand and eradicate glass waste from landfills. The glass additionally might help stop catastrophe, when scooped into sandbags that may shield susceptible areas from flooding.

Because the nonprofit’s identify implies, they’re optimistic about what comes subsequent.

“Mardi Gras is a time of hope and enjoyable,” mentioned Trautmann. Accumulating thrice as a lot glass this yr amplified these emotions. “It gave us numerous hope,” she mentioned.

Shifting from Recycling to Lowering Waste

Regardless of the expansion of the Mardi Gras Recycle Dat! initiative, Grounds Krewe’s recycling work is a really, very small drop within the bucket, Brett Davis mentioned.

“The waste shouldn’t be shrinking,” he mentioned. “It’s rising yearly and we’re simply barely maintaining with it.”

Actual inroads require going past recycling, to “waste prevention,” Davis mentioned.

His new ardour is so as to add to recycling by promoting sustainable throws. Grounds Krewe now provides a Sustainable Throw Catalog, that includes Louisiana-made merchandise. Up to now, the efforts have offered over 425,000 throws. 

This yr, many parade-goers had been intrigued, as they caught packages of purple beans, jambalaya, popcorn, cajun-boiled sunflower seeds and low beans, which flew from floats, together with different gadgets from the Grounds Krewe catalog, together with native and non-toxic toys, re-used glass beads and 100% recycled plastic cups. A part of the catalog’s philosophy is that folks could also be extra more likely to take house usable throws, resembling compact mirrors, nail care kits, material drawstring backpacks, hats, wood spoons and pot holders.

Whereas particular person riders have bought the brand new throws in bulk, krewes have but to make sustainability a precedence as an entire, Davis mentioned. 

Town, and its taxpayers, pay dearly for Carnival trash pickup—between $1.5 to 2 million yearly for the nightly cleanup crews and transportation to River Birch landfill, based on Matt Torri, director of the Division of Sanitation. 

Carnival is considered as a boon to town, so krewes don’t foot these prices. Every krewe pays town the identical modest parade-permit charge: a most of $1,500. Davis wish to see krewe members spend $10 much less on disposable plastic Chinese language throws and as a substitute put that $10 towards the Recycle Dat! program. 

Recycle Dat! might swiftly ramp up its efforts, with the dedication of even one massive krewe. “A superkrewe of three,500 folks might simply elevate $35,000,” he mentioned, “if every individual spent $10 much less on throws” — conventional throws, which might be more likely to find yourself on St. Charles as waste.

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