this month i donated to grounds krewe, who's mission is "to promote waste prevention, recycling and sustainable products at new orleans special events."
being in louisiana has been a bit of an eye opener. j came first and said that we didn't have a recycling bin, only a trash bin. i arrived and saw, actually, we only had a recycling bin? i figured this because it's blue. but in looking around, all our neighbors had green and black bins only, no blue? then i noticed that many of our bins had different waste collection agencies printed on them, so i think they're just... randomly distributed? i haven't been able to google anything solid on when trash pickup day is, or what they collect either; it's a mess.
speaking of mess, i've been going out to some mardi gras parades and they amount of waste is astonishing! float people throw stuff out at the crowd and, since it's free stuff, it's poorly made stuff. most times, people to catch the stuff, but often times, it hits the ground first which means that it breaks. and since there's constantly free stuff being thrown out, no one really cares for the broken stuff. here in slidell, parades are fridays, saturdays, and sundays. with one or two parades a day. for the regular parades, they city does NOT supply extra trash cans (or even port-o--potties), and neither is the stuff cleaned up after each parade. it is mostly picked up by monday morning though. storm drains are generally blocked, so stuff is mostly prevented from getting in there, but for the BOAT PARADES, people also just throw stuff up at people on land so A LOT of it ends up in the water! I did not see a boat with a pool net picking stuff up either...
so they don't seem to recycle here (tho there are drop off locations for recycling, which, let's face it, very few people will do), aren't particularly mindful of litter, and i don't think i've seen a single person use a reusable bag (I have not noticed about water bottles or reusable cups). ugh. nola DOES have a refill store tho, which we visited earlier this week, and I did pick up a few non-plastic sponges and a brush. (I messed up and didn't buy the dish soap, bah).
anyway, so i donated to grounds krewe because they're trying to do something about the incredible waste that comes with mardi gras.
