Waste management basics start with one tried-and-true best practice to help you gauge your venue’s progress on its waste management journey. Taking a back-of-house tour during your site visit or onsite experience is a must to truly understand how to handle waste management for your event.
Below, we will examine some key elements you and your team might encounter when visiting a venue’s waste dock and back-of-house operations. We are going to dig into the economics, how waste is separated, and the machines that make it happen.
Waste Management Varies by Location
Did you know that waste management varies significantly from location to location within the United States and worldwide? This includes what can be recycled, composted, or what is sent to the landfill.
Economics of Recycling Waste Management
Understanding the economics of waste is a key part of waste management basics. You may wonder what economics has to do with waste management and how it affects your event.
Waste is frequently considered a raw material or commodity by those who process and handle it. They process relative to whether a material will have financial value to a buyer. They also consider what can be commercially or logistically viable to recover amid a mountainous daily influx of city and regional waste discards. Requiring recyclers to focus on those items they can quickly recover and resell.
Waste Management Source Separation
Source separation is another component of waste management basics. Given the economic implications of commodity recovery and sales, you may see evidence of in-house source separation or “sorting” occurring at many venues. Conversely, it is common for sites to prioritize getting waste quickly out of the venue and into the hands of regional recycling, composting, construction and demolition, and landfill sites.
What To Expect On Tour
Here is a list of waste management terms you may encounter:
- Toters or Brutes: Rolling waste bins that transfer waste from front to back of house.
- Tip Carts or Gondolas: Large rolling containers used to transport higher volumes of waste and materials.
- Waste Streams: Waste is in 3 primary channels or “streams.” These are recycling, organics (compost), and landfill. Donations will become your fourth stream if the event has a food or materials donation program.
Waste Management: Tools of the Trade
More waste management basics will include the following tools you will come across on your back-of-house tour:
- Compactors: It is common to see large rectangular machines that use an internal metal ram to condense the size of materials input to make them easier and more efficient to transport. Some docks may even have a compactor for landfills and waste recycling streams.
- Bailers: Given that recovered waste materials are often treated as commodities for sale, they must be rendered into a cube shape that can be stacked, forklifted, and shipped. Onsite bailers bind large rectangles of material for transport, such as cardboard, aluminum, and plastic.
- Roll-Off Dumpsters & Yard Bins: Large debris containers, such as 20, 30, and 40-yard capacities, are found at many convention hotel waste docks.
Waste Management: Basics of Organics
Let’s start by defining and understand organics. Here’s a list to help you on your back-of-house-tour:
- Organics refers to wet “prep” waste, foods that cannot be donated, and compostable service ware.
- Wet waste is typically high in water weight and thus heavy. Fortunately, it is typically easy to collect since it comes directly from venue kitchens and stewarding staff. It is then typically routed to a compost site or pig farm.
- Some venues also have a digester onsite that converts wet waste into gray water, which is then sent via a plumbing system to water treatment facilities.
- A high-functioning venue organics program can be responsible for 20-30% of an event’s waste by weight, so it is something to watch out for.
Take That Tour
Taking a waste-focused back-of-house tour is one of the best ways to verify and demystify venue operations. It very well may yield opportunities for collaboration and optimization with your destination team. Due diligence here will also help give credibility and transparency to your reporting and stakeholder education efforts and bolster your team’s fluency and confidence as you decode and develop your event waste management programs. That is why at MeetGreen, we say, “Be sure to take the tour!”
Resources
- Back of House Tour Checklist
- MeetGreen Glossary: Includes event, hybrid, virtual, and sustainable definitions in an ever-changing industry
- Composting: Food for Thought for Future Events
- Waste Reduction and Zero Waste Events
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