Emerging Leaders Going for Zero
by October 17, 2011 3:59 pm 81 views
If you’ve played in any one of the beaucoup charity golf tournaments in Northwest Arkansas, you’ve got an idea of the trash that accumulates throughout the day.
The Northwest Arkansas Emerging Leaders, an initiative of the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce, is working to make those events — and others — zero-waste occurrences.
About four years ago, the NWAEL’s sustainability workgroup began recycling and/or composting every possible material that comes from an event. They primarily focused their efforts on golf tournaments, recycling everything from shoes and batteries to sugar packets.
The bulk of the items were the constants — plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper, glass and cardboard.
Today, the logistics have evolved, allowing this new way of conducting waste management at events to expand from the golf course.
“The first year we tried this, the waste went into containers and we pulled it out,” said Paul Wilson, community bank president for Northwest Arkansas at Intrust Bank in Rogers. He also heads up the sustainability workgroup subcommittee.
“It was extremely cumbersome and dirty, but by creating destination points with no other options to dispose of waste, we solved that problem. We’ve got a process now that will work for any type of event in any location.”
For the fourth straight year, the sustainability team led the recycling initiative at the ExxonMobil Summer Classic Golf Tournament sponsored by the Boys & Girls Club of Benton County in August.
At the end of the two-day event, there was just one bag of trash.
“We achieved our goal of recycling or composting the majority of the waste,” Wilson said.
On average, Wilson says the process eliminates an estimated 99 percent of waste generated from a typical event. NWAEL borrows equipment such as trailers, trucks, rolling bins and pop-up bins from the city of Rogers, making good use of community assets.
The idea has been by embraced by several groups in Rogers, which have sought instructions from Wilson and the NWAEL on how to create their own sustainability event.
Wilson said the workgroup is currently developing an online manual that will teach groups how to implement the logistics.
“Our goal is for every organization in Northwest Arkansas that hosts an event to utilize this process,” Wilson said. “Just imagine the overall impact if we can realize that.”