I had the honor of speaking to ISES, the International Society of Event Specialists this week.  My topic: how to host more sustainable events.  This group’s annual "Day of Education" was terrific. 

You can see the presentation here.  As I wrote it, I shared the beginnings of our journey to a zero-landfill goal.  We have set September 2019 (ten years from our opening) as our deadline.  Currently, we have about 4 times more reycyling as garbage, which is great.  Our recycling dumpster accepts the same items that most homes sort: aluminum, metal, glass, all plastics except styrofoam.  We actually pay less to our waste hauler for our recycling dumpster pull than for our landfill garbage.

Besides this recycling, we’re developing ‘specialty’ bins in our place for items like electronic waste– light bulbs, batteries, cables, disposable cameras, and the like.  We also have separate sorting for wine corks and scrap metal.  The wine corks will probably find a home in some type of art project or school.  The metal gets dropped off right at Armitage & Elston for scrap recycling.  Thank you Finkl for all the scrap metal recycling you do!

Food is the big item that we cannot address today, but light is on the horizon.  Composting was technically illegal in Illinois until last summer, but thankfully that law has been swept off the books.  Hard work has been taking place for over a year to build a commercial composting facility that will handle 600,000 tons of compost annually.  I can’t wait for that!

In the meantime, we continue to look for ways to prevent any kind of trash from happening to begin with.  We just discovered Empty Boxes, a business that picks up your old boxes and makes sure they are reused at least one more time before recycling.  They will also provide you with used cardboard boxes.  I don’t know anything else yet, but we’ll check it out and let you know.  Good time with garbage, have a great weekend!