Last year was the first Pride festival that Arthur “Sunshine” Zwern attended in Sacramento. But for him, it was no ordinary Pride: He was on a mission to see how the event could be more sustainable.
“I was there to observe waste … and looked around and realized the vast majority of it is food and beverage service waste,” he said. “And I thought, we could make that go away.”
He saw food containers and water bottles overflowing from trash cans, largely because a lot of it was single-use plastic.
“It was full of plastic cups and cans and you know, plastic silverware and plastic wrappers and plastic this and plastic that,” he said. “So much plastic — it's all thrown away and it took energy to make it, it takes energy to throw it away.”
Then Zwern moved forward with the second part of his plan. He brought his findings to Sacramento’s LGBT Community Center, a nonprofit responsible for putting on local Pride festivities each year. With his help as a new volunteer lead for the center’s sustainability efforts, organizers plan to make this year’s Pride festivities the most sustainable in its history. They aim to reduce landfill waste by half.
“When they asked me to design a system for the festival I said, ‘I'm going to start with the clean sheet of paper and imagine a festival that has zero landfill footprint,’” Zwern said. “And then figure out starting at zero, what can I not get rid of? So it was sort of like an engineering problem.”
Making greener rules for festivals
At any big event, you’ll probably find similar issues: Lots of single-use plastic. Trinkets that are picked up for a moment, only to end up on the floor. Trash cans that aren’t cleaned out quickly, leaving waste to overflow.
Some festivals have made efforts to cut back. In New Orleans, a nonprofit called Grounds Krewe aims to reduce waste generated during Mardi Gras. During the nearly two-week long festivities, Grounds Krewe founder Brett Davis said waste from tailgating and abandoned trinkets offered by parade floats piles up quickly. One year, he said the city found about 93,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads clogging city drains.
“The [parades] themselves have become more reliant on paying for the cost of entertaining us all for free by throwing a bunch of stuff that is very low value, high quantity,” Davis said. “They started throwing so much stuff that the spectators out there couldn't keep up with it, and it just started hitting the ground and instantly turning into litter.”
Davis said one solution he’s found to this issue is simply making sure that the trinkets thrown from parade floats are actually useful to spectators, making it more likely that people would pick an item up rather than leave it behind. That could be items like biodegradable glitter kits or bamboo toothbrushes.
“That’s our philosophy,” he said. “Higher quality, lower quantity and functional in some way.”
Zwern said he’s heavily inspired by previous experiences at Burning Man. He said the weeklong event has attempted to become more sustainable over time, following the motto “leave no trace.”
“Leaving no trace means, don't let it hit the ground — pack it in, pack it out,” Zwern said. “But at a deeper level, it also means, can you avoid the traces in the supply chain that got you this thing and in the waste chain that gets rid of it when you're done?”
Collin Lourenco, the Pride and events director at the LGBT Community Center, said organizers are expecting around 25,000 attendees to the Sacramento Pride festival this year, with even more attending the free parade.
Handling waste for that many people can be daunting — but with Zwern’s help, he said center staff is determined.
“We can't have Sacramento Pride or any Pride if we don't have a planet,” he said.
Lourenco said one of the biggest changes attendees might see this year is more signage explaining what is compostable and recyclable. The center also worked with Republic Services, a waste service provider serving Sacramento, to identify fully compostable containers made of palm leaf for food vendors.
“You’re not going to see any Styrofoam, you're not going to see any plastic cutlery,” Lourenco said. “You're going to only see food service products that are actually going to end up being digested in the compost bin.”
Attendees at the Sacramento Pride parade on Sunday, June 9, 2023.Courtesy of Sacramento LGBT Center
A new model for events
Organizers of the Sacramento Pride festival and parade are hoping their new approach can provide a blueprint for other festivals.
“There's so many other places and so many other centers and so many other non-profits that put festivals out there,” said Luis Cortes, the center’s chief development and external affairs officer. “And it really is our hope to be the example or to show them the little changes you can do to make a bigger impact.”
Some of that change is already on the way, thanks to a California law that went into effect a couple years ago requiring the recycling of organic food waste. Starting earlier this year in March, organizers of city-permitted events bringing in at least 500 people are required to submit a waste management plan to the city. That includes plans to manage the three kinds of waste they’re required to handle: food waste, recyclables, and the stuff that goes straight to a landfill.
Erin Treadwell, a manager with the city of Sacramento’s recycling and solid waste division, said she’s been in contact with organizers of other festivals to talk about what their plans should look like. But she said the LGBT Community Center’s approach went further than the plans she’s seen for other festivals.
“Their aim for sustainability, we think it's fantastic and it's above and beyond,” she said. “We really applaud and we hope other festivals will follow suit.”
Zwern said he doesn’t want these sustainability efforts to stay behind the scenes. At the end of this year’s Pride parade, Zwern is organizing a group with the nonprofit Sacramento Valley Spark that will carry trash pickers and signs reminding people to sort their waste.
“Our hope is that people take some of this home and are more conscious about this in the rest of their daily lives as well,” he said.
This year’s Sacramento Pride festivities will be hosted on June 8 and 9 at the Capitol Mall. People interested in joining this group at the end of Sunday’s parade can RSVP for a spot.
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