Green Year

Later today Rachel’s going to ping the theme camp list with an incredible offer: the City Of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, with whom she’s worked on Scrap Eden and other projects, will be bringing several huge dumpsters to the playa this year, and will be distributing 100 de-logoed green municipal trash bins.  The goal? Composting. Specifically, collecting all the compostable waste from event operations like the cafe, plus as much as they can handle from 100 lucky theme camps.

Post event, it will all be hauled to the Jepson processing facility in Sacramento. The resultant organic compost will end up on vineyards in northern California.
It’s like some weird sister city program, and on the surface it doesn’t make any sense: why go all the way there, to haul garbage? The answer lies in who Burning Man/Burners are, our relationship to San Francisco, and the power of thinking outside the box. The city needs to increase composting, period. Doing so has huge benefits, all over the place. So they could do the usual–go to green events, hand out flyers, that sort of thing. Or, they can come to the event and let people see the benefit first hand, in an environment where they’re hyper sensitized to garbage. Figure 1/2 the people on the playa are from SF, that means thousands of people seeing and experiencing the benefit of composting, and taking that home with them.  Makes a lot more sense that putting up another bus billboard or the like.

Only in San Francisco would we have a bureaucrat who can see the potential here, then help realize it. Everybody wins, and again, BMORG isn’t stepping in to do it for people, rather they’re letting the answer spontaneously emerge. Someone will find a reason to criticize this, I’m certain of that, but then again, those that don’t often criticize those that do. I favor the later type myself.

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