Rubbish and revelry: Can Mardi Gras go 'green'?

A successful Mardi Gras used to be measured by how much waste it produced. Now, the world's largest free festival is trying to clean up.

The mood is festive as I board the pink and purple Mardi Gras float. Beautiful glass beads hang from hooks lined up above my head while burlap bags full of sustainable "throws" – the local moniker for items thrown to parade viewers, including biodegradable glitter and colourful but sustainably packaged beignet mix – sit at my feet. A jaunty brass rendition of the song "Do whatcha wanna", a Mardi Gras classic, fills the air as marching bands do quick practice runs of their sets. The Krewe of Feret, the first Mardi Gras parade to completely outlaw plastic throws, is ready to roll, kicking off a party that is both one of the most beloved and one of the most environmentally damaging festivals in New Orleans.

The Mardi Gras revelry in this city is known the world over. New Orleans welcomes millions of visitors during carnival season and more than 50 parades roll down the main streets of St Charles and Canal. Local bars and music venues are packed to the walls with tourists while elaborate Mardi Gras balls and other events meant mostly for locals happen behind closed doors. All in all, nearly $900m in income comes from the festivities, according to a recent Economic Impact study – almost 4% of the city's annual revenue.

The celebration lasts for more than a month, with "local" parades like the dog-themed Barkus, where people dress their furry friends in Mardi Gras costumes and parade them through the French Quarter, rolling as early as three weeks before the final – and most famous – parades on "Fat Tuesday". These often include celebrity guests, massive floats and the iconic and ubiquitous plastic beads thrown by the handful into the crowds.

Unfortunately, all this fun also leads to an equal amount of rubbish. It's estimated that Mardi Gras creates around 1,000 tons of waste every year. In 2018, 93,000lb of plastic beads were found clogging up the city's sewer system, a dire situation in a city that lies partially below sea level and whose sewer systems are needed to keep the city dry. After the parades, rubbish can be knee-deep in the streets, and beads and streamers hang from trees like the Spanish moss native to the area. Though the city's Department of Sanitation does an almost miraculous job of cleaning the streets between parades, refuse still makes its way into the waterways in and around the city, posing a threat to both wildlife and people.

This year, however, a coalition of grassroots organisations, and individual "krewes", the local groups responsible for putting on the Mardi Gras parades, are attempting a transformation with the help of the city and some supportive sponsors. From massive recycling projects to biodegradable throws, New Orleans is doing its best to clean up its act.

According to a 2020 report by the Ecology Center, the plastic used to make Mardi Gras beads is toxic, containing high concentrations of arsenic, chlorine and lead. Further, the report found strong evidence that these beads are made from recycled e-waste, plastic from electronics treated with flame retardants. The sheer volume of beads that end up in the streets and sewers raises fears that these toxins will leach into their surroundings. Indeed, the areas around parade routes have already been found to have elevated lead levels and some of the chemicals found in the beads have been linked to increased cancer risk.

For a city that's both at major risk of flooding and located in what's known as Cancer Alley – an 85-mile stretch along the banks of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where residents have higher rates of cancer due to pollution from nearby petrochemical and manufacturing plants – continuing to throw a massive party that stands to increase the risk of both may seem ill advised. However, the tradition of cheap plastic throws in some ways fuels the entire event.

"It is the largest celebration in the world, but who pays for it?" asked Brett Davis, founding director of Grounds Krewe, one of the nonprofits spearheading the movement to make the festival more sustainable. "It's the parading organisations and the krewes themselves. They do it with membership dues, they do it with balls and fundraisers, but more and more over the last 20 years [they do it] by importing huge quantities of cheap parade throws and selling them to all the people in their krewe for like a 600% markup."

As Davis explains, the cheap beads are sold to locals or visitors who want to climb aboard a float and throw these trinkets to the crowds. And these sales fund the parades themselves, as it's the krewes, not the city, who put on Mardi Gras. A strict rule against any corporate advertising, intended to keep it feeling like a community event, makes it difficult to divest from the practice of selling plastic beads to members as throws.

And there's more at stake than just a free street party. Mardi Gras, and the traditions that take place in and around the festival, are part of the fabric of the city.

It's hard to overstate the importance of Mardi Gras in the larger culture of the New Orleans. Media representations of the event often focus on the drunken debauchery of Bourbon Street; however, most of the event is quite family friendly and something the entire city gets involved in. The Uptown parades, which take place on St Charles Avenue during the day, are crowded with children playing and elderly neighbours resting in lawn chairs waiting for the next float to pass by.

"Having the perspective of riding on a float and throwing what we're considering just junk beads to a young child… and their face lights up. It just brings tears to your eyes," said Linda Baynham, the Director of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility at the New Orleans Ernest N Morial Convention Center.

She says the practice of throwing to the crowd can be meaningful despite the mess it causes. "I like some beads," she added, showing off a small collection of purple, green and gold throws she'd already caught from passing floats that weekend. "If you get this much from one parade, there's nothing wrong with that. If there's no beads, it gets to be a little disappointing."

It's easy to see why locals and visitors are hesitant to give up the experience of "playing catch with a city", as several float riders put it. There's a community-building aspect to Mardi Gras that's hard to put into words, and for many, losing the traditions and celebrations that make up carnival season would feel like losing a major part of the city's soul. Simply outlawing throws altogether would likely lead to massive pushback from residents.

For Suzannah Powell, a producer and performing artist who serves as a sustainability advisor to the Krewe of Freret, part of her job was figuring out that balance between tradition and sustainability when making decisions about what is allowed on the floats and what isn't.

"We [still] have those plastic cups, which are everywhere. I'm a member of the plastic pollution coalition and in our ideal world, those things aren't even present. However, I actually advised that we should keep those as an offering because they're culturally such a huge thing," she explained. "They're a sought-after throw and people like to keep them and have different ones across different years. In terms of trying to make a cultural shift, I thought that those cups are specifically a really great example of the bridge that we're crossing. You can't just come in and start swiping everything up with a machete. You have to make concessions for where people are actually at."

So, what is the solution? Is it possible to make changes that will preserve the important cultural and financial benefits of Mardi Gras while also mitigating the extreme impact it has on the local environment?

One of the krewes that marches in the Boehme parade, one of the local parades that rolls through the French Quarter during the earlier part of the carnival season, is the Krewe of Recyclists. The group dresses up as comedic versions of recycling-themed superheroes, including Hans Can-Crusher, played by Kevin Fitzwilliam who is the founder of Atlas Beads, an organisation that distributes eco-friendly alternatives to plastic beads. Created as a pun based on Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live, the character crushes cans with his muscles for recycling along the parade route to the amusement of party goers.

But New Orleans' recycling heroes are not just fictional characters created for carnival. The coalition of organisations, volunteers and sponsors that make up the Recycle Dat Initiative are working to help Mardi Gras, and the city of New Orleans, maintain both its traditions and the environment for years to come.

Started three years ago by Davis, Recycle Dat began as a handful of local volunteers with small recycling stations set up along the St Charles parade route, but has expanded exponentially since then, offering an alternative to the efficient, but less meticulous clean up done by the Department of Sanitation, which sends everything they capture to the landfill.

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Last year, Recycle Dat collected 4,302lb of aluminium cans, 4,288lb of glass and around 12,697lb of beads and throws. Now with a new larger, more visible set up, they expect those numbers to be even larger. This year, the programme launched Recycle World, an interactive recycling station on St Charles and Louisiana Avenues where festival goers can drop off their unwanted throws and rubbish, volunteer to help sort cans, bottles and throws for recycling and even participate in an art project created out of recyclable materials gathered on site.

Grounds Krewe are also instrumental in making sure alternatives to plastic beads are available to krewes during the season. The organisation offers a variety of sustainable throws, including jambalaya mix, soap and biodegradable glitter, to name just a few – all of which can be individually branded according to the krewe's themes.

For those still interested in throwing necklaces, Atlas Beads offers handmade creations by a women's collective in Uganda; their beautiful beaded necklaces, bracelets and earrings, lovingly spun from discarded magazine paper, are much more likely to be prized by parade-goers than left behind as rubbish.

In the end it's the krewes who decide which throws to use, but even there, a sustainable groundswell seems to be taking hold. This year was the first time that the Krewe of Feret completely outlawed plastic beads from their floats, opting instead to throw glass beads and other more useable items, a move they say garnered massive support from the community.

"The reaction [to Feret banning plastic beads] was huge," Powell said. "It actually sent ripples around the city. The [krewe's] website shut down that day because there was so much traffic and this was the biggest year that the Krewe of Feret has ever been. They had to add two additional floats just to accommodate the new members."

Not only did their actions encourage more members to join the Krewe of Feret, the grassroots movement to green carnival may also have inspired one of the largest Mardi Gras krewes, the Krewe of Rex, to experiment with using more sustainable throws, such as stainless-steel cups, wildflower kits and natural fibre tote bags. The Krewe of Rex are known as the "King of Carnival" because so many of the Mardi Gras traditions started with them – including the tradition of throwing beads – so their use of sustainable throws this year is a massive sign that things are changing.

Over two days, traversing the city of New Orleans from Uptown to the French Quarter, everyone I spoke to was thrilled to learn about the efforts to make Mardi Gras more sustainable. One visitor, who described wading through waist-deep debris to retrieve a dropped phone, was particularly enthused. There was also widespread interest, and ideas, regarding potential new kinds of throws, with suggestions ranging from local art to food to books.  

Green or not, it's clear that no one wants to see the end of Mardi Gras. The question is whether this movement can catch on in time to make an impact on an already beleaguered urban ecosystem. Fitzwilliam believes the artists and activists working on the issue are on track to make it happen in classic New Orleans style: "Garnering support for a more environmentally friendly Mardi Gras is best accomplished by simply having more fun than the other side."

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