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A-Seed volunteers. I believe the young man in the corner is doing his job and picking something up, in spite of appearances.
My friend Sarah reported earlier about her experience as a garbage sorter at the Summer Camp music festival north of Chicago, as a comparison to our experiences in Japan, and I finally managed to rustle up some concrete info on the Fuji Rock side of things this past weekend, thanks to Tokiko Djakovacki from A-Seed, the Japan-based international NPO that has managed the refuse at Fuji since the beginning (and that manages it at many other music festivals and ‘youth culture’ events), who graciously agreed to speak with me during her dinner hour Sunday night.
At Fuji, the mantra is “gomizero”, “gomi” meaning “garbage”, indicating their desire to recycle 100% of the waste here. To accomplish this, A-Seed has a staff of 230 volunteers there just for the festival, plus 50 permanent A-Seed volunteers. The volunteers work two four-hour shifts on small teams, and have the rest of the time to enjoy the festival.
Needless to say, the operation runs pretty smoothly and seamlessly; the most obviously public activity of the volunteers is to stand at the garbage and recycling stands and direct festival-goers to place each item in the correct bag. This results in most of the garbage being sorted at the outset, a stark contrast to Sarah’s experience at Summer Camp, where she felt she accomplished little at the stands and did most of the work sorting garbage after the fact at the vomit-inducing sorting tent.
The A-Seed Sorting Booth
Not that everything is perfect at Fuji; there’s still some after-the-fact sorting to be done (although, compare how a Fuji Rock garbage sack looks compared to one from Summer Camp). This sorting is accomplished by an ingenious community- and ownership-building scheme of having the festival goers themselves do it. For 5-10 minutes of sorting garbage they receive a small Tower Records towel and their name is listed in Tower’s in-store magazine Bounce. This is, of course, a pittance, and surely the real motivation of most people who do it is their passion for the environment. After all, Fuji Rock paper cups this year become Fuji Rock toilet paper next, and clean PET bottles with labels and caps removed can be recycled for much higher quality materials (like fleece, t-shirts, and materials for benches; in 2007 the A-Seed staff jackets were made from recycled PET bottles) than those left intact.
This bit of community ownership of cleaning and waste is like an extension of the Japanese public schools, where there are little or no professional janitorial and cleaning services, but a portion of each day is devoted to cleaning, with each student participating on a team to make sure the school stays spic and span.
I found this remarkable when I started working at Japanese schools ten years ago. My first experience of such a thing as a child myself was, ironically, at an actual summer camp, and I recall my petulant 12-year old self feeling quite above the task of cleaning toilets (i.e., cleaning up after myself), as this had always been done by the janitors at my school, until I was properly schooled in the ways of personal and community responsibility. (It was a lesson hidden in layers of meaning for me to sort out: I believe the counselor said “quit whining and do it”.) It is good to learn at a young age that there is no ‘away’ to throw stuff and that you are not a little prince who can get ’someone else’ to do your dirty work. Seeing it in the Japanese public schools and remembering my long-ago summer camp humbling, my thought was how desperately American children need this in their schools.
The PET Bottle Mountain
If you want to participate next year, this sorting tent is located right at the beginning of the path to the White Stage from the Green Stage. As the weekend progresses you can see the mountain of bags of PET bottles growing; the sorting tent is right across the path from that.
I’ll end with this caveat: It’s really apples and oranges to compare the two festivals, of course; Summer Camp is a smaller and more niche festival focussed on jam bands, with a local company handling garbage duties called Old Hippie Recycling. Fuji Rock is one of the largest music festivals in East Asia, and A-Seed is an international youth organization with a focus on community building and human rights in addition to environmental issues. And I have no doubt that the people at Old Hippie Recycling are every bit as committed to the environment as A-Seed (and if their name is accurate, then for much longer than A-Seed too), and applaud them for finding a way to make a business out of taking care of the planet. Still, I find it an interesting and instructive comparison of two cultures.
Once again, the original Summer Camp report
last photo by Dom
