Countdown to Expo Next:
Get New Ideas To Grow Your Show!
Home » Best Practices » Waste Management

Waste Management

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 By Nancy Jackson

Part of the New Orleans’ Ernest N.Morial Convention Center’s greening effort (a partnership with the city started in 2007 in response to client demand) called for 210 new recycling bins for paper, plastic and waste. But instead of sending the existing trash cans to the landfill, convention center employees stepped forward to repurpose and reuse the old ones, saving the center more than $100,000 and diverting mounds of non-biodegradable fiberglass cans from the local landfill.

Members of the convention center’s operations staff sanded down and repainted the existing trash cans, cut down the lids and cut slots into the tops — a process that was
simple and didn’t involve any special training, says Tim Hemphill,Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the center.
 
“New recycling containers aren’t cheap; if we had to buy them today, they’d cost nearly $500 each,” says Paul O’Connell, Assistant Director of Production and Technology Services at the convention center. “By repurposing the old trash cans as recycling bins, we saved $103,000. Not to mention the space they’d be taking up in a landfill because fiberglass doesn’t decompose.”
 
Sets of three bins — one for paper, one for plastic and one for waste — were placed throughout the facility’s lobbies and public spaces in time for the Society of Human Resource Management show in June. After each event at the center, a local waste service provider hauls the materials to a recycling center for sorting and weighing, and provides the convention center with a breakdown of the recycled materials by type.
 
Hemphill says the recycling cans “are the tangible and most outward signs” of the center’s broad greening program.When organizers meet at the Morial Center, “they know that by meeting here, they’re minimizing the impact on the environment through the programs we offer,” he says.