Getting Green at the Get Down

Jess Wymer

10/12/2016

Admit it: the majority of us end up a little fuzzy after spending the weekend at a music festival. If there is one thing that we can not forget about though, it is the ecological footprint that big events like these tend to have.

The Otis Mountain Get Down is one festival that is trying to find their way around this complex issue. For those who have not heard of it, you have seriously been missing out. This intimate and unique occasion takes place during the second weekend of September at Otis Mountain in Elizabethtown, NY. The venue is about an hour and a half away from Burlington, making it the place to be for college students from Champlain College and the University of Vermont. The weekend also attracts many folks from outside of the area, such as families with young kids looking for a fun camping experience.

It is inspiring to see a small festival like Otis growing in sustainability initiatives in proportion to how it has been growing in size. I got the opportunity to gather some insight on what is happening there from Brian Somers, the sustainability coordinator for the Otis Mountain Get Down.

This past year was sold out (2500 tickets) for the first time – how do you prepare to manage trash and recycling for 2500 people?

We started by thinking about how we can create the easiest way for our attendees to do their part. I guess it begins with simply figuring out placement strategy. With the number of people at the festival, the easiest way to manage waste is to have everybody sort it on their own into the correct bins.

I really try to focus on the strategic placement of bins, as well as their visibility and continuity. Continuity is important, but making sure that all the recycling bins and trash bins look the same everywhere is kind of difficult when bins are as expensive as they are. We are focusing on high traffic zones to get the most out of the number of bins that we have, and we have really tried to jump into the campsites a bit more. Then it is just trying collect all the bags to get them to our disposal location.

I’m curious about the sorting of trash and recycling… Do you guys go through it all?

Oh yeah. It was funny actually, we had a volunteer join in on a collection run and she said, “I’m always surprised to see all this trash getting collected and it’s never getting sorted.” I just told her to hold on and you will see, because we have a whole dumpster area behind the scenes.

We have been working with Casella [Resource Solutions] for the past two years and they donate the dumpsters to us, so they’ve been super helpful. We get one zero sort recycling and one trash, and we essentially just get on top of them and sort right between the two, tearing nearly every bag open.

If you throw bags of recycling into the container, I think there is a higher probability that they will actually end up in the landfill due to contamination. What I personally end up doing a lot of is simply ripping open the bag and dumping all the recyclables in, and throwing the rest of it into the trash.

It is definitely a hands on and dirty job, but we want to get it done, so we do it. There is no glory in it. But we do get to avoid the mishaps of just sending it all to the landfill, because I am sure there are tons of events that just cannot really get ahold of their management and it just all ends up in the dump, whether they know it or not. If you send out a container of recycling to the recycling facility and they decide there’s too much trash in it, it is possible that they could just send it all to the landfill.

Recycling at Otis, Malcolm Watts

I imagine that there’s a lot of confusion around what you can and can’t recycle.

Oh, absolutely. Styrofoam and other food containers all say recycling on them, but they are not once they are soiled, whether Styrofoam gets wet or containers get covered in grease. Take a pizza box for example: before you put pizza in it it’s very much recyclable, but once it’s covered in grease there is no value in recycling it. So that’s a huge issue that the festival and the recycling industry at large have to deal with.

Do you compost at the festival?

This year was our first attempt at composting. We teamed up with Juniper Hill Farm out of Wadhams, NY and they were planning on feeding everything to their pigs. That meant we had to collect solely organic materials, since we cannot feed pigs plates or utensils. Items like plates, cups, or utensils need to be processed at a large scale facility such as a commercial outdoor compost or an anaerobic digester. We did not have access to one of those nearby, so our goal was to send out all the clean material that we could gather from our food vendors back-of-house.

We collected as much food waste as we could, but I was really surprised to see how little material there was to be collected. We expected that the vendors would prep a lot of their food before arriving, but it was impressive to find out that everything that they brought was sold and consumed. One thing that did stick out in the compost was the amount of corn cobs, but by the end of the weekend I realized that our food waste wasn’t as big of an issue as I had originally thought.

I would really like to find a place to send our compostable plates and utensils for years to come. There is actually an ongoing project in North Elba, and it is a really interesting small self-contained anaerobic digester. I was talking with them this year but the project has not been completed yet. I am really pulling for them to be set up for next year.

 What does the Otis crew do to ensure that the festival is limiting its impact?

I think it really comes down to communication with the attendees and trying to get them to leave their campsite as they found it. We don’t like to see small fires around. This was an exceptionally dry year so there’s a good reason, but also you don’t want to burn and char up the ground everywhere. We try to put signs out to minimize any destruction such as “naturalize your campsite” and “pack it in, pack it out”. We definitely stepped up our signage game a bit more than last year.

The next big sustainability issue on my mind is carpooling. I think that we improved this year on how many people carpooled but in my own personal opinion, I will not be done until we no longer find people arriving alone or with just one other person. The parking attendant told me that at least half of the cars had three to four people in them, and that is huge. That is one of the most difficult things to manage, how do you encourage somebody to leave their house with three other friends when they can easily go on their own time and leave when they want. If four people can share the same emissions that one person would produce otherwise, I would love to see that.

We have toyed around with bus rides from Burlington and Plattsburg, but that is something that we don’t have enough manpower to manage right now. The day-of logistics in that alone are a headache. We would be super stoked to see a third party come in and say, “I would love to sponsor this caravan/van/carpool”, but we haven’t come across that yet.

Parking Lot at Otis, Malcolm Watts

What’s up with the wooden stages?

The main stage has been up for nearly 15 years. I think the lean-to by the fire pit is about 20 years old. Jeff Allot, the landowner, and his buddies built them. They used all donated materials, most of which were pre-used, and all of the logs came from the property.

Everyone involved has gotten their hands dirty building this and that. Something that my buddy Evan and I have spent many hours putting together was all of the boundary fences around the site. We would find dead falls in the woods, and just prop them up. The only thing we put into it that did not come from the land was probably a few necessary timber lock screws here and there. Other larger and heavier duty builds have called for more hardware and felling some sturdier trees. But it is great being able to find just the right piece there at Otis without damaging the overall ecosystem.

How do you balance cutting costs with things like sustainability initiatives at such a small festival where you do not have a lot of money?

Deciding where to spend money is really relative to each organization’s goals and philosophies. But yeah, money is a pretty funny thing for us. We essentially got started with $200 out of our own pockets the first year and have kind of always worked on that bootstrapping budget since.

This year was a bit easier because I currently work in a recycling facility so I was able to get a hold of some extra bins. We had black frames with transparent bags where everyone could see the waste through the bags. Getting those bins through work was huge, seeing that they are $100 apiece and say you have 60 of them out there, that’s just something we can’t afford. We have scrounged up the other bins from here and there and have painted all of those to make them look like recycling bins.

I’ve focused on sustainability from the beginning, and our initiative has not necessarily always been trying to save money but trying to get the most out of it. We just inherently just want to use money as purposefully as possible.

How do you encourage festival-goers to be mindful of their impacts?

We did a short Instagram video of our recycling bins getting painted last year, just to get people thinking about it. We have done a video and photos of what to pack, so that is kind of trying to emphasize that the smaller pack would be easier.

Bringing less stuff, that is a huge thing for me. The less stuff that people bring, the less stuff that will be there at the end of the weekend. If you do not bring it in, you do not have to take it out. Reducing what enters the facility would be incredible progress.

Do you have any sustainability initiatives or projects in mind for next year?

Well, a huge improvement we had this year was getting the [on-site] well going, and therefore eliminating reliance on bottled water.

For next year, I will be focusing on how we can increase carpooling and again improve waste management. Singling out particular problem materials would be a great way to approach communicating with attendees about waste and keeping those problem materials out of our waste stream. For example, red solo cups were one thing that stuck out when going through the bags of recycling.

Cutting down on waste and making it easier for attendees to better sort their own waste is at the top of my list, as well as carpooling.

If you’re willing to speculate on this… do you think a music festival that is 100% sustainable is possible?

Yes. Anything is possible. Very, very difficult but it’s definitely possible. Practical, maybe not.

It is just hard when you get that many people in for a short amount of time. We are pretty small but when you’re talking about a much larger festival, you have attendees coming from multiple cities to gather and you’re essentially creating another city in itself. You can’t bring that many people together and not expect it to be damaging.

When it gets to that size, I think you have to ask yourself whether your impact falls within the organization’s mission and goals and say, is this too big to manage in an environmental aspect? It would be nice to see some of these larger events step back towards something smaller and ecologically compatible. That is a huge reason why we stay small, it is quality all the way through. Once you get looking at the bottom line and say we need 10,000 more people here, that goal of 100% sustainability is much more difficult to obtain.

Do you have any tips for festival-goers?

Ride with your buddies and only bring what you need.

 Anything else?

Feedback is a difficult thing for a weekend event. People always have fun and say, “Oh, great job”, but it’s been hard to get constructive criticism. And with that, I would love to ask for help in the realm of sustainability. So if anyone who has attended has anything to contribute about how we can improve ourselves, let us know at info@otismountain.com, the more opinions the better.

I’d also like to point out that although I have been hard on the attendees for creating such a big project to manage, I know that they are probably one of the best crowds in the industry. Sometimes it’s just difficult to immediately recognize after spending three days digging through their trash. But looking back, I think we are blessed with a respectful and gracious community that is much more conscious than the average crowd at a larger and more corporate event.

Got Feedback? If you’ve got any feedback for Brian and his team, reach out to them at info@otismountain.com

Want to help out? If you want to volunteer with the Otis Mountain Get Down, check out their website at otismountain.com/volunteer