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Garbage Sorters At Summer Camp Music Festival, Near Chicago
I’ve always been impressed by how vigilant the garbage bin minders at Fuji are with keeping order in the chaos of trash that inundates the festival every year. You walk up to the garbage with a paper plate and there will be between 2 and 60 people behind the stand bearing down on you to (cheerfully) direct you to the correct bin, or (cheerfully) wrestle the paper plate out of your hand if need be. My friend Sarah recently did the same job at the Summer Camp music fest near Chicago, and I thought I’d pick her brain a bit on what’s probably the worst volunteer job at a festival, and maybe gain some insight into two cultures and their trash. (Full interview after the jump.)
At Fuji Rock they are pretty intense about making sure the trash is properly sorted right from the start, when someone puts it into the bin. But it seems like the sort of smiley friendly confrontational style might not fly in the U.S. What was you experience doing it at Summer Camp?
Yeah, I distinctly remember my friend from Yamagata-machi [in Ibaraki-ken, where she lived for several years] telling me that all of the trash was sorted through to get the recyclables out at Fuji Rock. And this was some 10 years ago. I was awestruck and jealous that the U.S. couldn’t get it together. I guess we’re doing better now, but the sorting at point-of-entry was just not working that well at Summer Camp. When I had to actually go through the garbage, bag by bag, for my second shift (we work three five-hour shifts over the course of the weekend), I realized how almost entirely useless these separate bins were. And I felt totally good about not having tried very hard the day before, when I was working directing people to the right bins. I guess the bins helped some. The trash was kind of in the right spot. But not really. It was sort of like cleaning house and just throwing everything in the bedroom that belongs there, instead of putting it away.
So you pretty much blagged your duties when you were in charge of pointing people to the proper bins?
Fuji Rock bin-minder, ready and most definitely eager to help
No! I totally did my job! I didn’t monitor the whole time. That seemed too labor intensive. I just stopped people if I saw them heading for the wrong bin. But if I missed telling them, I didn’t care. I would just go to the bins myself and sort it out better all at once like every 20 minutes or so. But maybe the Japanese are on to something with the preemptive speeches. I just stood there by the bins that whole night wondering how assertive I should be. I hated being bossy but felt like I should be doing more when I stopped. I wish I could have removed myself emotionally and just barked out orders like you described at Fuji Rock. But I couldn’t. It was hard to care when I saw that there were a lot of trash areas that weren’t even being monitored. That was when I realized that this sorting thing wasn’t being taken very seriously.
So there must have been a lot of sorting to do behind the scenes then.
The tent where I sorted for my second shift was set up away from the crowds. This job was really pretty gross. There was puke and other wicked stuff. We sorted it into glass bottles, cans, plastic bottles, compostable, and trash. When we cracked open a fresh black bag of garbage, I felt a strange mix of nausea and excitement at what we might find. I always hoped it was bag of pure recyclables (bottles and cans). Those were easy and fun. I got really good at going super-fast with those. It is great that the plates and cups and silverware were all compostable, but it made for such a gooey disgusting mess at the sorting tent. We came across a lot of crazy stuff – unopened beers and chips, a whole pack of unopened bacon, shoes, clothing, etc. I had to walk away several times so that I didn’t wretch. I think the dirty baby diaper was the worst. I could have wretched and it wouldn’t have mattered.
The set up was like this: they made these flat tables with mesh bottoms so that the liquid would drip out. By the end of the first shift, we were standing in mud. I worked with some particularly whiney babies that day. One girl was reeling from a really bad ‘shroom trip the night before. Another kid was muttering “This is bullshit. This is such fucking bullshit. I can’t believe we have to do this.” Up with people.
Fucking hippies, always going on and on about the environment and freedom, but when the rubber hits the road they vote with their feet, don’t they?
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Umm, so was there anything redeeming to the work?
Fuji Rock's PET bottle mountain
I liked working hard the whole time, at the sorting tent. Standing there doing nothing at the bins was my hell. Am I totally demented that my idea of a good time is a seemingly endless pile of stinky-dripping-throw-uppy garbage to sort through? I found such succor in this hard labor. It’s probably mostly circumstantial, as I was coming off of an 8-month unemployment binge.
The most exciting thing that happened that night was when a kid in cut-offs and a Dead shirt came rushing up to the general store all breathless and said, “call an ambulance!” This cute blonde girl who was working the beer was all “What? Really?” To which he replied, very seriously, “YEAH. I mean like 9 – 1 – fucking – 1.” I’m glad he had the time for a cool f-bomb in spite of this emergency. He proceeded to tell us with great passion that the guy was unconscious or maybe in a coma. I got to see the cops pick this drunk or stoned kid up (very NOT comatose) in one of their noxious 4-wheelers. He had fallen and bashed his head on a large piece of pottery. There wasn’t even any blood. I overheard one copper say that he was “that guy who ran off into the adjacent corn field naked last year”. I felt pretty excited about my role in all of this because I had to run down to the front gate where I told Someone Important With a Walkie-Talkie who was sitting on a lawn chair to alert the medics.
Always exciting when a doped-up hippie bashes his head and has to go whining to The Man for help.
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Yeah, so thanks for the insights. Reckon you’d do it again?
Well, I became a ‘favorite’ of the company hired to do the trash stuff because I worked hard and didn’t complain. They gave me free food and shower coupons, and the guy in charge of the whole sorting/recycling told me to come work for them the whole time next year and gave me his card etc. I felt like Eddie Haskel.
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Hope this puts your Fuji Rock trash experience into some perspective. It’s a dirty job, but somebody is actually doing it, and for that we should be grateful.
-Kern
Photos respectively by Sarah, Dom, and Dom
Read Part 2, about Fuji Rock and A-Seed’s garbage solutions, here
