Manisha Kar: Football and Sustainability – Two words not often placed together
Football season for NC State students is arguably the best time of year. Watching our team kill it on the field while feeling the crowd’s energy is truly an unmatched feeling. While everyone is drinking and dancing in the crowd or trying to avoid the long lines at concessions or bathrooms, have you ever stopped to think about the trash? The answer is probably not. That’s where the Waste Reduction and Recycling Office comes in. The Waste Reduction and Recycling Office operates to collect waste, recycling, compost, and other materials generated on campus.
Specifically, as a Zero Waste Student intern, I was tasked with helping with waste reduction projects here on campus including bin installations, bagging, inventory checks, and waste audits on campus and for the home NC State football games. This job entails managing volunteers by training, supervising, and coordinating them at these games to redirect waste away from landfills, instead toward compost and recycling bins. My job also entails educating and engaging the NCSU campus community on zero-waste and waste management through events and interactive tabling. I also work as co-president of the Zero Waste Wolves club meaning I help lead meetings, come up with events, create PowerPoint presentations, and work with the rest of the board to promote a zero-waste lifestyle.
Unsurprisingly, at football games, no one particularly cares about where their trash goes. Most individuals at these games are trying to spend the least amount of time outside the stadium as possible which means throwing your trash in the nearest bin. This means a lot of things that could be recycled or composted instead being sent to landfills effectively ending their life cycle as well as a lot of recycling and compost bins being contaminated. Our goal as interns was intimidating as we saw a large, crowded stadium filled with loud rowdy fans excited to watch football with no regard to where their trash ended up. We had to navigate communication with the other interns and the volunteers who were often high school or college students who came for volunteer hours, a free t-shirt, and a guaranteed ticket into the game.
When initially deciding to sign up for this internship I was skeptical that I could even handle it. Such a large-scale operation seemed intimidating, but it was something that I knew was important. Waste reduction is something I take very seriously in my own life, but I only influence redirecting my own trash away from landfills (and possibly my family and friends), but helping out at a large event meant making a difference larger than myself.
At my very first game, we got rained out. As we ran back to the car soaking wet, we were faced with the sight of a stream of trash carried by water going through the stadium and the parking lot. Right then and there I knew that my job served a purpose and that any amount of difference made towards trash having a new purpose made an impact. With that new outlook on my internship, I came into that next game with a new sense of purpose to help prevent contamination at the games.
Our job at the games involved setting up the arena days in advance ensuring that we set up stations around the arena where we could have volunteers stay to sort trash on game day. We intentionally set up the bins in a semi-circle and never try to leave a recycling or compost bin by itself without a trash bin right next to it so hopefully people will throw their trash in the right bins. Despite setting up the stations before the games, we would show up on game day with our bins all over the place due to trash contractors or vendors moving the bins around. Game day tasks involved collecting our volunteers, giving them information about the program and what their responsibilities entail, dropping them off at their station, keeping volunteers engaged and checking in on them, picking up the compost bags and weighing them to see how much trash we redirected away from landfills, placing and replacing the compost bags in women’s restrooms, and staying long after everyone has left to pick up compost bags, recover food, and totaling up our compost bags. It was a lot of work, especially factoring in the fact that we are in a loud rowdy crowd where it’s hard to hear, talk to large groups of volunteers, call/communicate with other interns, pick up compost bags before contractors got to them and sent them to landfill bins, and so much more. It was chaotic. That doesn’t even include all the things that went wrong like gates being locked on us, volunteers leaving early without telling us leaving stations deserted, scales being stolen, golf carts dying, running out of compost bags, and torn pants (all stories for a different day).
Despite all the chaotic craziness that occurred at these games, I had so much fun. I got to do something that I am so passionate about, create change larger than myself, especially in a place where waste diversion is not the main goal on everyone’s mind, and I got to do it with a group of people who are as passionate about sustainability as I am. My favorite part of this experience was being able to create change larger than something I could achieve myself in an environment where if there was not this effort implemented there would be no compost redirection and most things would be landfill.
Overall, this internship, both in the Fall and Spring semesters, let me be the absolute geek I am about this kind of stuff. I got to spread education on sustainability, waste management, and diversion, and other important information on a wider scale. I got to make a difference in my on-campus community as I helped people learn about something as simple as where your trash goes, but trash is something we throw away every day, multiple times a day. There is so much misinformation out there and being able to even just answer someone’s questions lets these materials live a longer, better life than simply ending up in a landfill to generate greenhouse gasses.
This internship has formed my plans as it showed me, I really like education based on sustainability as well as being able to contribute to large-scale projects targeting waste diversion. Working on a team to recover materials that are worth more than being in a landfill is something I hope to continue, and I will hopefully remain on the Zero Waste team here at NCSU for my final year here.