Waste Warriors at the Eugene Celebration

Trafton B.

August 28, 2010 - 4:24 PM

The Eugene Celebration is somewhat like a community pep rally. It's a weekend dedicated to strengthening neighborhood relationships between citizens, small business owners and students alike. Consider it a massive block party with great food, parade floats, live music and friendly people sharing a common purpose of celebrating the city they live in. Earlier today, I had the chance to join the celebration for a few hours, but not in the exact fashion you might be thinking.

Around noon, Steven and I volunteered to represent the University of Oregon as Waste Warriors at the Celebration. It was a behind the scenes gig that I'd heard about from the PPPM email list serve a couple weeks ago. According to the email, we would be helping to sort materials generated by the event into recycling, compost and waste and in return we'd receive a free t-shirt and a weekend pass to the festivities.

The t-shirts is pretty cool, I'm not going to lie, and being your average college student I was stoked to be able to work my way into the event rather than pay, but whether or not the fruits of our labor outweigh the vulgar nature of our duties still remains in question. Allow me to elaborate.

Our task was to take the contents of somewhere between twenty-five and thirty trash bags and separate them into compostable material, comingled recycling, glass recycling, waste, etc. Simple, right? It was exactly what the job description explained. It was around the time when our two leaders, Lupe and Willie, started handing out smocks and vinyl gloves that I started to worry. The next two hours was spent sorting through oodles and oodles of Lord-knows-what people had thrown away throughout the weekend.

Bag after bag was dumped onto our sorting table. Our team of five UO students and a Eugene community member sifted through the remnants of several different food stands, all of which looked like they were very appetizing at one point. We saw a few cartons of melting Ben & Jerry's ice cream, lots of disposable plates and silverware and an unlimited supply of empty coffee cups. Let's just say that I'm really happy that Café Mam in downtown Eugene serves their fair trade coffee in compostable cups. And based on how many people are drinking it, I wish I could say the same for Starbucks.

I already know what you're dying to find out. What was the worst smell you encountered, Trafton? There was some heavy competition between diapers and leftover Greek cuisine, but the clear-cut winner goes to a few bags of soggy cigarette butts. I'll spare you the details of that foulest of stenches and leave it at that.

It really wasn't nearly as bad as I make it out to be. I could have done without the smell, obviously, but aside from that it was no more than few hours chatting with new friends and learning what can and cannot be composted by Rexius' compost facilities. I learned that any recyclable plastic that has touched food could no longer be recycled. Sadly, it gets sent to the dump. Those 99¢ Arizona Ice Teas that we all love don't have any CRV value in Oregon, whereas the majority of all other aluminum cans and plastic bottles can be returned for 5¢ a piece at Safeway or Market of Choice. And, like I said before, I'm really glad that most disposable cups are compostable these days, because Eugeners sure drink a lot of coffee and soda.

I'm certainly glad I went, although I wish I could have stayed at the Celebration afterwards. After our shift ended around 2:30, Steven and I quickly bolted home to rinse off the grunge that comes with two hours of digging through trash. We never did make it back to downtown. Oh well, I guess there's always next year.

Coundown until Ducks Season Opener: 7 days!!!