It ain’t easy being green. Just ask David Larson. For years Festivals and Concert Events, Inc. (FACE), where Larson works as sales manager, had been trying to get the 70,000 plus fans and vendors who attend its two annual five-day musical festivals near Detroit Lakes, WE Fest and the 10,000 Lakes Festival, to recycle their plastic, glass, aluminum, paper, and cardboard.

“It didn’t work,” Larson says bluntly. Too many people continued to put recyclables in the garbage, and garbage in the recyclables, contaminating the recyclables and turning them into more garbage.

Last year, however, the company debuted a new three-pronged strategy under the banner “WE B Green” that emphasized reduce, reuse, and recycle. With a $75,000 grant from Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Larson and other FACE employees started from scratch, throwing out the ubiquitous stand-alone recycling barrels in favor for a more customer-friendly approach. They encouraged attendees to bring less, promoted the use of reusable beverage cups and other items, and set up staffed recycling stations.

“We went at it saying everybody knows how to recycle, basically. They’ve been educated since the 1970s, but they don’t know how to do it at our site,” Larson explains. “So instead of putting out maybe 500 barrels for recycling that basically turn into garbage, we put out 15 stations, one in each campground and a number of them around the [concert] bowl to educate people on how to do it.”

Taking a page from city recycling programs, FACE also instituted daily “curbside” pickup at campsites and provided campers with separate bags as they checked in, one for aluminum, one for other recyclables, and a third for trash. FACE also picked up cardboard and other recyclable materials from vendors each night.

“If you’ve got somebody going by willing to pick up your recycling, you’re just more likely to recycle,” Larson points out. And they did.

“They really were very successful,” says Peder Sandhei, a pollution prevention specialist for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, pointing out that in previous years, WE Fest had never been able to recycle more than 7 percent of its solid waste. Last year, with WE B Green, Sandhei notes, they set a target of 20 percent and exceeded it, recycling a total of 24 percent of their solid waste.

A big part of that gain came from just reducing the amount of waste overall, Larson estimates. Promotional brochures for WE Fest encouraged people to bring less stuff and that alone reduced the amount of waste by about 100 tons. WE B Green effort paid off in other ways too. Clean up after the festival was easier. A lot of people got a refresher course in recycling.

“We sent 70,000 people out there who had just spent five days of being indoctrinated in how to recycle again,” Larson says. “I’m guessing that, not all 70,000, but maybe 15 or 20,000 of them are much better recyclers now than when they came here.”

As part of the two-year MPCA grant, FACE is developing an instructional DVD and booklet that will be distributed free in an effort to make it a little easier for other event promoters to be green.