Salmonfest kicked off in Ninilchik on Friday afternoon and ran through the weekend.
Between Saturday’s music sets behind the festival’s second-largest stage, Dylan Budke climbed atop an 8 foot tall recycling dumpster. He plays keyboard for the Chugiak-based blues band Black Barrel and the Bad Men, but he used to volunteer on the festival’s waste crew. He sang to a small group of this year’s trash sorting crew, who were on break.
After a round of high-fives and smiles, the volunteer crew got back to work. They sorted through bags of aluminum cans, plastic bottles, paper bowls and other waste collected from 75 trash receptacles throughout the fairgrounds.
“Trash does not go away, and we don't throw anything away, there is no away,” said Soph Nielsen, Salmonfest’s lead of waste management. She’s also the owner of WeGenerative, an Alaska waste management company.
“Every piece of matter is not created or destroyed," Nielson said. "Everything has a finite purpose in the world, including trash, and is a resource.”
The amount of waste coming from Ninilchik significantly increases during Salmonfest and the days following. Waste collected at the festival is largely sent to Alaska landfills or a recycling transfer station in Homer. Those recyclables might end up at other facilities in the Lower 48 or Asia.
But Nielson says waste diversion efforts on the Kenai Peninsula are looking to keep some of those recyclables in state. She says some plastics sent to Homer are passed off to a local company that turns it into lumber. Glass is often crushed and used as a backfill that maintains the health and lifetime of landfills. All compostable material collected at Salmonfest, like food waste, goes directly to a Homer farmer to feed livestock and soil.
Nielsen says WeGenerative prevented about 35% of last year’s festival trash from going to landfills. That’s the equivalent to a humpback whale worth of trash, according to the company.
Nielsen says keeping waste in state reduces the festival’s carbon footprint.
“Being able to keep as many resources that end up in the state, I think, is really powerful, and it reduces the emissions that we experience when we're just moving things from one place to another,” Nielsen said.
Nielsen says she’s worked at music festivals where attendees don’t dispose of trash properly. But she says people at Salmonfest are more cognizant of reducing their waste, and credits that to the festival’s pro-fish, anti-Pebble Mine environmental message.
David Stearns, assistant director of Salmonfest, says reducing waste fits the ethos of the festival.
“You know, human activity is so incredibly impactful at every level that anything that you can do, that us as a species can do to reduce our impact is important," Stearns said. "So even on our little level trying to do that, I think hopefully that ethic will continue to spread.”
WeGenerative, and Salmonfest, hopes to reduce even more of the festival’s waste in the years to come.
