2011 Frederick Festival of the Arts to be its Greenest Yet

NEW this year at the Frederick Festival of the Arts, happening June 4th and 5th at Carroll Creek’s Linear Park in downtown Frederick.

Waste Not! Frederick will be partnering with the Frederick Arts Council and Waste Neutral to provide the greenest festival to date! Since 2009, Waste Not! Frederick has provided volunteers to collect recyclables at the Festival of the Arts. This year, the Frederick Arts Council and Waste Not! Frederick have pooled resources to enlist the help of Waste Neutral to collect and haul away not only recyclables but also compostable material at the event.

The Frederick Festival of the Arts is now in its 18th year. However, this is the third year the festival has been managed by the Frederick Arts Council. Since taking over the event, the organization has worked to make the festival more environmentally-friendly and composting is the next step. "We appreciate the assistance Waste Not! Frederick has offered over the past few years," said Shuan Butcher, executive director. "We want to continue to find ways to make it a greener event," he said.

Participating food vendors who have agreed to use compostable food serviceware are:

• JB Seafood
• Eastport Concessions
• Penguins Shaved Ice
• Roy’s Concessions
• Just Smokin Around
• BP Kettle Corn
• Meadows Frozen Custard

Local sponsors for the effort are:

• E-End
• Sustainable Living Maryland
• Sierra Club-Catoctin Group
• Data Management Services
• Healthy Living Marketing
• Custom Imprints
• Gallagher/Wood Design
• Bellwether Printing
• Waste Neutral
• Beamingsun

Patrice Gallagher, a WasteNot volunteer, said, "It’s great for the Festival of the Arts and for so many local organizations and businesses to be invested in green practices at this popular and well attended event. We’d like to see a growing awareness in the public and amongst festival organizers about how to minimize waste."

WasteNot volunteer Karin Tome noted that "Food scraps, soiled napkins and compostable food serviceware will break down easily into usable compost that would otherwise become methane-producing trash in a landfill. The more material that we can remove by recycling and composting at these events, the less material we’ll have to dispose of in the landfill. We’d like to see this kind of sustainable effort become the norm at public events and in people’s everyday lives."

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