Tuesday 25 September 2012

Out, proud and green

I've just discovered what a great job the team at Manchester Pride are doing on making our city's annual gay pride party - one of the biggest and longest running in the UK - into a more sustainable event.

This year was as fabulous as ever, with a bit of science theme thrown in to commemorate the amazing Alan Turing (apparently a “Gayger” counter was featured, as well as a profusion of Turing’s Sunflowers). The Pride team also made huge headway on cutting their waste, too.

They got all the businesses in the cordoned off area for the event to suspend their own waste company collections during the period so they could manage all the waste across the whole site.

Historically it's been difficult to get the bars to split their waste into recyclable and non recyclable due to the fact they are so busy over the weekend, so they took the decision to employ additional staff to go into the bars themselves to collect the bottles and other recyclable waste.

The bars are mainly on a run along Canal Street so the staff went from one bar to another along the strip collecting the waste.

Pride's aim over the last few years has been to increase the amount of waste recycled and five years ago, the recycling rate was approximately 10% - they had some ground to make up.

This year, in total, their waste management company collected 22,700kg of waste and recyclable materials and they recycled a total of 9,590Kg which means the recycling rate was a massive 42.25%, nearly 10% up on last year's figures and a big leap up from 10% five years ago.

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