With about 200,000 expected festivalgoers enjoying the plethora of food and drink vendors at this year’s Riverfest, waste is inevitable.
Robert Robinette, member of Riverfest’s Go Green committee, is leading the charge to help reduce the event’s environmental footprint.
“Our goal is to recycle as much aluminum cans as we can,” Robinette said. “No pun intended.”
The Riverfest Recycles initiative, which is in its seventh year, aims to recycle about 100,000 aluminum beer and soda cans.
“It’s proven that recycling, especially aluminum cans, saves all kinds of energy,” Robinette said.
It takes about half of a soda or beer can worth of gasoline to produce a single aluminum can, he said. “If you fill a can half full of gasoline, and you pour that on the ground, thats what you’re losing by not recycling the can. So 100,000 half cans of gasoline poured out, thats a waste."
Recycling receptacles are generously placed throughout festival grounds. One can't walk far without encountering the red and white barrels adorning Coca-Cola's logo and messages imploring festivalgoers to recycle their cans and bottles.
But Robinette and his volunteers are working to recycle cans that don't make it into those receptacles.
Located on President Clinton Avenue, under the Interstate 30 bridge, is the Riverfest Recycles station. On Saturday, two volunteers, along with Robinette and his brother Randall, were crushing and bagging cans gathered Friday from the festival grounds.
“What we do is we have volunteers come in after hours and they go pick up the cans after the events close,” Robinette said. “We bring them back here and today we’re crushing them, and we’ll take them to a recycling facility.” Robinette said volunteers we're collecting cans from around the concert stages until about 1:00 a.m.
This year Robinette, who works as an engineer for Entergy, introduced a roving can crusher, dubbed the can van, to help mobilize the process.
“I built that in my living room,” Robinette said. “What I found is that it doesn’t like being hauled that well, so the can van is stationary at the moment, but we pull it around some.”
Crushing helps reduce the volume of cans, making them easier for the volunteers to handle. “They’re much easier to carry when they’re crushed,” Robinette said.
Recycling volunteer and Little Rock Central High School student Lauren Berry, 14, said she can fit three cans in Robinette’s contraption at once. “It crushes them to about an inch tall,” she said.
Berry’s awareness of the benefits of recycling compelled her to donate her time Saturday, she said.
“I love Riverfest, and I know that so many people use cans, so I think it’s really important to keep our earth clean and recycle,” she said.
Sorting through bins of hundreds of cans — some still full of beverage remnants, requiring volunteers to dump them out — is a less than glamorous task. But Berry said she's had a good experience doing her part in helping reduce waste.
“It’s more fun that I thought it would be,” she said.
