Late last week was the annual Summer BBQ at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, located outside of Harvard Sq. This event and the Holiday party mark the two biggest events where hundreds of scientists, along with their friends and family enjoyed a couple hours of festivities (and luckily some great weather as well). This year the Harvard Green Team, with support from the Harvard Office of Sustainability, teamed up with the event’s long time organizers: the Harvard-Smithsonian Social and Recreation Committee. The organizers tried to make it a zero waste event – not an easy task with that many people and the “this is how we’ve always done it, we’re not changing a thing” mentality.

Being involved with the Green Team, I staffed one of the many compost areas to make sure the right materials ended up in the right bins. I also took photos of the event (one which is posted here). There was quite a lot of people involved to make the event happen, from the volunteers cooking food, setting up and cleaning up to the people who found the biodegradable plates and utensils, and the  minimal packaging food and drink.

At the end of the day, there was a lot of positive feedback and the totals at the weigh-in were: 213 lbs compostables, 92 lbs recycling, and ONLY 15 lbs trash. Less than 5% of the waste of the event going to a landfill. The attendance was estimated at about 500, and with a minimal budget, it was quite eye opening for me to see how much planning, research, time and dedication is involved to pull off an event like this. But it was well worth the extra time and effort and, hopefully, this was the start of a new annual tradition for the event.

Tags: green, harvard, sustainable

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 11:09 am by Kevin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.