The Newport Seafood & Wine Festival, put on annually for 49 years by the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce during the third weekend in February, generates thousands of tourists to the coastal town during a normally quiet time of year. Along with generating visitors and associated revenue, the festival also generates a large amount of waste. This is where the Seafood & Wine Festival Green Team comes in.

This year’s efforts resulted in 72% of the waste being diverted (2% increase over last year) from the landfill comprised of the following being recycled or composted:
• 8,470 pounds of glass
• 3,300 pounds of Cardboard & Comingled recycling
• 1,140 pounds of Mixed Compostables (food waste including oyster and crab shells)
• 29 BottleDrop bags of redeemable beverage containers collected (approx. total of 145 pounds based on average weight) with redemption benefitting Samaritan House.

All in all, that is a total of 13,055 pounds or over 6.5 tons recycled or composted during the four-day festival. To give context, Lincoln County has a 30.9% annual diversion rate for all waste collected. Events are especially hard to achieve high diversion rates and work best when they have waste attendants.

The Rotary Club of Newport has been serving as the clean-up crew at Seafood & Wine for over 20 years and in turn receives a donation for its duties. For the past 4 years, they’ve changed the format by forming a Green Team which staffs waste stations, hands out recycling guides to vendors, and works with the Seafood & Wine Committee to encourage vendors to use approved compostable food serviceware.

To accomplish this, it takes 65 volunteer slots during festival hours Thursday through Sunday, including general cleanup on Sunday. Since 65 slots are a big ask of one organization, Rotary shares the online signup to organizations throughout the community offering a $50 donation to every volunteer shift filled by their organization.

With the majority of Green Team volunteers on behalf of Rotary, this year it also included volunteers from Surfrider Newport Chapter, Samaritan House, Logsden Community Center, Coastbusters, Salvation Army of Lincoln County, Central Coast Humane Society, Newport High School Wrestling, Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, the Hatfield Student Organization, Siletz Valley Fire Volunteers, and Newport High School Grad Night.

One of the added benefits is that every volunteer who worked a four hour shift is now is a trained recycling guide and can share their knowledge in our community to work towards Rotary International’s 7th area of focus, the environment!

News Source : https://rotarydistrict5110.com/newport-club-organizes-green-team-diverting-72-from-the-landfill-at-seafood-wine-festival/