NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets of New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras with parades and partying, leaving behind an avalanche of waste.
At dawn Wednesday, a motley waste management crew embarked on the unenviable mission of cleaning up tens of thousands of pounds of detritus spread across the city's historic French Quarter.
Riding through a sea of waste
Leander Nunez, 54, steered a massive truck onto Bourbon Street just after 5 a.m., spraying water onto the piles of waste so they could be more easily swept up. He's a supervisor for IV Waste, the company contracted by the city to help clean up many of its most popular streets over the 58-day Carnival season.
Beaded necklaces, tossed from balconies and floats, crunched beneath wheels as the truck passed daiquiri bars, strip clubs and fried chicken joints.
Waves of trash that included cans, wrappers and neon green plastic cups for “hand grenade” drinks rippled out from the front of the truck as if before the bow of an ocean liner.
With the sun rising, people stumbled out of bars and saluted the trash collectors. A drunken couple shrieked and leaped onto sidewalks to escape from the cascade of waste as Nunez muttered about Bourbon Street's “typical foolishness.”
From the perspective of the grizzled veteran Nunez, the cleanup was a lighter lift than in previous years, likely due to the chilling effect of a Jan. 1 truck attack on Bourbon Street and storms that cut short Tuesday's parades.
“Only thing I can judge it by down here is by the trash,” Nunez said. “There was people down here for Mardi Gras, but I don’t think the trash is the way it used to be.”
IV Waste has the logistics down to a science to get the French Quarter fully cleaned up by around 10 a.m. each day, said owner and president Sidney Torres.
After wetting down the trash, teams wielding pressure washers spray garbage off the sidewalks. Tractors bearing bristles and nicknamed “toothbrushes” scrub the asphalt, targeting beads. Bulldozers plow into the piles and dump them into trucks capable of bearing 40,000 pounds (18,144 kilograms) of waste at a time. Small teams on foot armed with brooms sweep anything left over into dust bins.
Then comes the final touch: a citrus spray Torres calls “lemon fresh.”
“It’s not just fragrance like putting perfume on a pig. It has enzymes in it that kill the bacteria,” Torres said. “You can have a clean street, but if you smell the puke and the stale beer and liquor that’s washed out onto the streets, it’s a foul odor and people remember that.”
Sustainability efforts on the rise
Over the past three years, a collection of organizations has stepped up efforts to improve the sustainability of Mardi Gras and cut down on the more than 2 million tons (1.8 million metric tons) of waste generated during the heart of the city's Carnival season.
“It’s almost an unfathomable number and feels like an uphill battle,” said Franziska Trautmann, cofounder of the glass recycling company Glass Half Full. “But the team is noticing a difference.”
Partnering with the city and other groups, Glass Half Full collected more than 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms) of glass from nearly two dozen bars as part of a “Bar Wars” contest and at recycling stations along parade routes, Trautmann said.
Anna Nguyen, a spokesperson for the city's Office of Resilience & Sustainability, said the city is working with community groups to engage and incentivize recycling, with groups offering rewards for anyone who turns in bags of beads, cans or bottles and an artist building a mosaic from them.
This year, the city had earmarked $50,000 to support Mardi Gras recycling for the first time and has increased that budget by fivefold for next year's season, Nguyen said. Convention planners and groups looking for cities to host events are increasingly prioritizing sustainability, she added.
But it's also part of a cultural shift toward greater sustainability among social clubs and parade-goers during Mardi Gras, according to Kevin Ferguson, vice president of external affairs for New Orleans & Company, a nonprofit dedicated to boosting the city's tourism: “What we’re building is more of a movement than an individual project."
A positive sign, he says, is that “throws” — the trinkets that float riders toss to spectators — are evolving to feature more items that people want and are likely to keep.
“That's just not happening with beads anymore. No one's picking that up off the ground,” Ferguson said. “I think you're seeing riders are buying less of that and more of other things.”