One Bag of Trash

As you learned below, we wrapped up our Annual USEE Conference in Brigham City last week. It was a great event with many, many wonderful presenters, attendees and accomplishments.

I would like to highlight one amazing feat...

We had about 90 people at the conference over two days, feeding them breakfast and lunch both days. The spread of food was beautiful (see a picture of Nancy's amazing feast below), and no one complained of being hungry. Now, if you've planned or managed events before, you might think, wow, feeding that many people would generate a lot of garbage. You could probably estimate the amount of trash this would produce. 5 bags? 10 bags? 4 bags if you include a recycling bin?

I'm proud to say that the USEE Conference attendees only generated one bag of trash. ONE! We purchased reusable plates, cups, and silverware from the thrift store, recycled the limited beverage bottles available, requested that attendees bring their own coffee mugs and water bottles, and filled a 5 gallon bucket with green compost (for my garden and the worms)!

Just think about how easy this would be to do at your events at home, your place of worship, work, etc. Do you have any other ideas on how to produce less waste?