Tyler Bonner - Pioneering Zero Waste at Outdoor Events

[00:00:10] Dominique: Hello, welcome back to another episode of Green Champions,

[00:00:13] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert. 

[00:00:20] Dominique: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and have done something pretty cool about it.

[00:00:30] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for Green Champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:37] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are joined once again by Tyler Bonner. He's the founder and CEO of Zero Waste Event Productions. Basically, he built a company to make festivals and other outdoor events, zero waste events. So today we're chatting with Tyler more about his success in building this company and how it drives sustainability at outdoor events, festivals, and music concerts.

Last time, if you've missed it, Tyler shared a bit about his journey through AmeriCorps working with Rural Action and even doing some really interesting ecotourism work. If you're wondering how maybe your career can start by traveling to The Bahamas, then maybe go check out the previous episode. But yeah, so excited Tyler's back. 

Remind our listeners briefly, what is Zero Waste Event Productions and your mission behind the work? 

[00:01:20] Tyler: Zero Waste Event Productions is a social enterprise that works with music festivals and other outdoor events. Helping to manage all of the material generated at each event with an emphasis on diverting that material from the landfill through reuse, recycling, and composting.

We also provide all the equipment and signage and anything else that we'll need. We set up an onsite sorting center with a portable conveyor belts. We're sorting everything on the spot. And we do the final cleanup afterwards, so sort of start to finish maximizing diversion

[00:01:50] Dominique: Let's pause on the portable conveyor belt because I feel like that is something that I like, we shouldn't buzz over. I work in zero waste stuff as well and like no one else has that. Can you talk about what value that adds and why that's special and so cool at any event?

[00:02:06] Tyler: I guess on the surface, it is just a really valuable tool for quickly and safely sorting through all of the waste

 So basically it's got a hopper on one side, we dump a bag into the top. It slowly runs down and sort of spreads out across the belt. People standing on one edge and bins that were sorting into along the other edge and sorting out, cans, recyclables cups, compost, and tossing them to the bin on the opposite side. So any true trash or anything dangerous or baby diapers or something, potentially gross is just going down the belt into the trash at the end. So definitely efficient and safer than like spreading it out on a tarp or a table or bending over and just pulling outta the bags themselves. 

But it also provides like a really great aspect of visibility to the work that we do. We generally, it's not always possible, we don't wanna be right smack in the center of the festival and the crowd, but we wanna be in a space where people can walk over and see the work that's being done. people are continuously walking up and asking questions and like really engaging around, not just our work, but asking questions about what can they recycle at their houses and like taking tips that they can bring home with them.

When they see that you're sifting through every bag of material, they pay a lot more attention to reading the signs and making sure to put it in the right bin. And also just like picking up after themselves too. So we see a pretty huge difference. Sometimes even from like day 1 of an event to day 3 of the event, the bags that we get on the conveyor belt tend to be cleaner and they're quicker to sort.

[00:03:40] Adam: Wow. Really? So people learn throughout the event. 

[00:03:42] Tyler: Yeah. Having the system for a few days, but also, just seeing the work that's being done and like really engaging in it makes a big difference. 

[00:03:49] Dominique: And a big part of sustainability struggles we've seen around waste with organizations is trusting that somebody is really putting the right signage on the bin, that it's really going to those places. We've all heard like, "Oh, that's the recycling bin, but they don't really recycle here." But I love what you're doing in the sense of forcing the visibility that somebody really is sorting. to understand that at this event here with Zero Waste Event Productions, that like they do care and are making an effort.

[00:04:14] Tyler: Yeah. I think it goes a long way and also because the rules of recycling in particular change from city to city. sometimes folks may be recycled their entire lives, but they flew in from New York and now they're in Columbus or something, and they're attending this festival and the rules are slightly different. So they might not necessarily know all the details of what a specific community can accept or can't. 

When we're visible and we're able to have that conversation, it goes a long way because thinking of a particular festival we did where they locally only accepted source separated recyclables. Bottles and cans and glass, everything had to be in its own separate bin but because our system travels, up to 40 events a season all across the Eastern United States, we have like a really uniform system where everything is commingled in the recycling bin. 

And we kind of bring 'em back to the sorting center and say like, "Yeah, we did the research, we know, but we can't have five bins just for recycling at each station. So it creates a spot where we can collect everything and then we sort through it by hand and we're separating cans and bottles and cups down the line.

[00:05:19] Adam: And what level of zero waste are you able to achieve at the events? 

[00:05:23] Tyler: It really depends on the event itself. Where the event is located is a huge element of that. If there's a local facility that can take compostable material, then that opens the door to work with the festivals to get a contract with food vendors to serve only on BPI certified compostable service ware.

So the location is a huge aspect, but the organizers themselves really are a key player in this whole process because not only do they need to kind of have the desire to set policy to maximize our ability to achieve higher diversion rates but they kind of need to have a mechanism to enforce that. The events we've seen the most success at are like the Nelsonville Music Festival in Southeast Ohio.

And a few others have, not just a strong suggestion, but actually have like a contract agreement with food vendors saying that they have to serve on only compostables. And there's a little bit of teeth in that contract too. Like they will potentially lose a deposit that they put down to save their space and they might not be invited back for future years, which is a big deal for especially in smaller communities.

[00:06:29] Dominique: So what is the journey like for the event organizerif I'm working with your team ahead of my event, during my event, what does that look like?

[00:06:37] Tyler: Initially the conversation sometimes folks hire us just because we do a really good job at managing the waste and the sustainability stuff is like a bonus but sometimes they're like very sustainably oriented and they seek us out specifically for those reasons. So depending on where on the spectrum that is, our initial year working with a festival, we might be coming in and just setting like a baseline, seeing what material are in the waste stream to begin with.

We always do recycling across the board. If a compost facility is available that first year, we might be doing like pre-consumer compost for getting food scraps from food vendors, but not necessarily pushing for the full contract until we really get that baseline set. At the end of each event, after we sort material, we actually weigh all of the bags that we have sorted. So we track all the statistics throughout the weekend my business partner Shannon produces a really nice infographic report that highlight those successes, highlight the diversion rate, but also there's a section in the report that has suggestions, like things that went really well and that are already in place, like you have water refill stations and that really cuts back on single use plastics and stuff like that. 

But also a section for like, ways that we could improve and really push that diversion rate higher for years to come. The goal, the hope is that each year we can pull that report back out, when we're having the conversation with the organizers and say, "Okay, yeah, last year it looked like some of your food vendors were already using compostables and there is an outlet for it. Let's try to take the step and push to have that across the board."

[00:08:14] Adam: You do that for each event?

[00:08:16] Tyler: Yeah, so it's a big conversation for each event because we do so many events, it's kind of challenging to be sort of juggling all those conversations at once. So a lot of that sort of prep and organizing work now it happens like throughout our off season. So all winter basically, you know, I'm already having conversations about July 2025. 

But also like in the early spring when we're like really starting to nail down who's going where, what equipment we're sending, in which direction, and trying to make the calls and line up dumpsters outlets for the material down the line. 

[00:08:50] Adam: I just wanna highlight the importance of being able to capture statistics of the impact that you're making and report back both on, "Hey, here's what you're doing well, but here's areas for improvement." I think that's fantastic, but something I've seen as well as really being a really good part of activities fighting climate change across different industries.

[00:09:07] Dominique: Yeah, I mean that all that stats also means you have really great impact numbers on the work that you're doing across all of these events. 

So do you have any interesting numbers for us of like your impact so far as an organization with all this work that you're doing?

[00:09:19] Tyler: Off the top of my head, I think this year we diverted close to a quarter million pounds. I think we were like maybe 220,000 pounds diverted from the landfill at all the events this season. That number has been growing quickly each year as we do not just more festivals, but we've been able to connect with larger festivals that are taking place.

So that number has been getting bigger each year, and I think total since the fruition of our social enterprise, I think we're pretty close to 750 or 800,000 pounds diverted from the landfill. we very well expect next year that we will exceed the million pound 

[00:09:56] Dominique: You'd have a million pound party.

[00:09:58] Tyler: Yeah, 

[00:09:59] Adam: That awesome. 

[00:10:01] Dominique: That's really incredible. 

[00:10:02] Tyler: Yeah, and what's wild too though it's kind of hard to comprehend those numbers, but if you take a step back and think recycling in particular is very voluminous and not very heavy. And we've done events where we have multiple 30 yard dumpsters full of specifically just like numbered one plastic bottles or like just aluminum cans.

And to see it like kind of sectioned off like that and to see the volume of it is, is really cool. And like that whole thing maybe weighs like 2000 pounds or something. It would be cool to seea million pounds diverted, like all standing in one giant pile, so it'd be a mountain.

[00:10:37] Dominique: Yeah. But you can't because you diverted it and it's back in the system in some way. 

[00:10:42] Tyler: Yep. 

[00:10:42] Dominique: but no, that's really incredible. I think also the average person, if I can dare to like assume their thoughts we don't really think about our impact at events 

A lot of the times we look more like our everyday life and things we do more on a systematic occasion. So I think it's extra powerful that you're a reminder in these spaces that we can do better. Even when they're doing a temporary pop-up type of celebration, that we can still be mindful of like just putting the right systems in place. 

[00:11:07] Tyler: Yeah, I think so and because a lot of times there is sort of this mentality that like, "Oh, we just throw something away" and where is away?

 Is it going to sit away in a landfill or is it turning into a new aluminum can in 16 days or something? I forget what that statistic is. part of our work though too, is to try to make that as easy as possible, not just on the organizers, but the attendees as well.

[00:11:30] Dominique: Anyone knows organizing an event is heavy and hard and the worst day of it is when it's probably happening, so you got all these things to run around. So the fact that you're there to also take off what is a really stressful role. 

[00:11:42] Tyler: Absolutely, yeah. Our team is on site the very first day that the site is being built. We're putting up kind of a couple bins for trash and recycling mostly ahead of time, like as the stages are being built or as their offices are getting set up and so they have a place to discard their stuff.

And then we're working through the event and then we're there cleaning up afterward. And once everybody's offsite, we're kind of doing the final walkthrough. I think because we're able to provide such a nice turnkey service that the organizers don't have to worry about renting a bunch of bins or hiring the staff or making sure the site is clean or keeping an eye on the VIP and making sure that the tables are cleared That really adds a lot of value to the work that we do and takes a big stress load off of somebody that's got 10 other irons in the fire especially the day of. 

[00:12:30] Dominique: How are you sitting in front of us as one single human and you manage at least 40 events in a season?

[00:12:38] Tyler: I have a wonderful team and that's always been the case even from the start of this business, it was me and two partners. 

[00:12:46] Dominique: They both did serve in the AmeriCorps program with the Zero Waste Program at Rural Action. The one fellow doesn't work with us anymore, but Shannon Pratt Harrington is definitely my right hand and since the beginning she served in the program after me. When I left the AmeriCorps program, she stepped in and was taking over that work as I was really trying to get the clients and launch this business. And then as soon as she was finished, we actually got a really awesome grant from the One Foundation who provides grants to support social enterprises. targeted in the Appalachia region.with that grant we were able to pay for her salary for the year, and with her weight behind it, we were able to support her into the future.

[00:13:26] Tyler: So, the two of us have been going since 2018 but under Zero Waste Event Productions, LLC, like 2018 was when we became our own separate entity. But more recently we've actually pulled on three new members. So we've shared some of the ownership of the business, so that three more champions that have been working with us over the years just felt like they had more skin in the game and could share in the project itself.

So Shannon and I kind of had gotten to the point where like, I mean, COVID didn't 

[00:13:56] Dominique: Yeah. It's very notable that you persevered through... 

[00:13:58] Tyler: Right, every event being canceled 

Well, and just to highlight, you did some cool things during the pandemic, right? Yeah, that's right. W

e did a pivot project where we set up like a small scale plastics manufacturing shop. So while no events were happening, we were like collecting laundry jugs and some hard to recycle materials in our own community in Athens and cleaning 'em and bringing 'em back to the shop. We've got like a shredder that shreds 'em down and then like an injection molding machine and an extruder. And we were making like in our off season through the winter make coasters and little plant pots and baskets and just a whole variety of neat trinkety things that aren't paying the bills by any means, but it's something to work on when we're not on the road all the time.

 But the year after Covid was particularly challenging because, I think it was 2021, all of the earlier events in our season either canceled or a lot of them rescheduled to dates later in the summer. And then about June, all the festivals started coming back. People have been cooped up for a year and a half. Every festival that year saw like 20% more people than they were expecting, the ones that we were working anyway. So already it was like larger projects. We had a pretty small team. Shannon and I were basically working two different events every weekend, so having to be the only person on site calling all the shots, making it happen. 

And then the early season events then overlapping with our normal later season events on top of it. And we got to the end of that year and we're just like, "We either need to scale back and like just focus on Ohio or just do a handful of projects that we know we can tackle." Or like, "We need to think about expanding and bringing more people into the leadership of this project." so that's what we ended up doing. We brought in Austin Wheeler, Louis Preston, Lexi Bashara and they've been a wonderful addition to the team.

[00:15:47] Dominique: Staffing wise, so you leverage local volunteers at each event? Because you're doing a very physical task in a lot of places. 

[00:15:54] Tyler: Yeah, it is. So volunteers are an option for some projects. Generally, there are a few folks that want to volunteer with us specifically if they see an event on our lineup that is something that they want to attend. But most of our volunteers are recruited from the festival itself. So when we do have volunteers, the festivals are, organizing them and getting them in place, and then we're just leading the effort and educating them on our system and stuff.

[00:16:21] Adam: What's that volunteer experience like?

[00:16:23] Tyler: It's fun. It's not as dirty as you would imagine. We've got aprons and gloves and everything that we need, especially because it's like on the conveyor belt,

 It is a very neat, tidy way of doing a really messy job. 

So a lot of it is sorting on the conveyor belt, making sure the recycling and the compost is clean and there's no contamination. We break that up with like litter sweeping the main stage after the band is finished and the whole crowd moves to the second stage that we'll get in behind the crowd, kind of reset the scene.

Pick everything up off the ground, we'll reset any bins that are getting full. We try to consolidate bins down the line so we're not like wasting bags or anything. It's fun work too because you get to do the work at a music festival and you're like...

[00:17:07] Dominique: What motivates them to show up? Is it wanting to be present at the event?

[00:17:10] Tyler: Yeah. Most of the time you get like a free ticket to the show, you might get a T-shirt, a free meal or something but yeah, you get to do the work in the crowd. So when you volunteer with other departments, you might be in the parking lot directing traffic or standing at the front gate, holding a sign or telling people to pull their bags out or something. But when you work with us, you get to be like in the crowd, kind of fingers on the pulse, wandering around the event, and like listening to the music while you do it. So it's pretty fun. 

But then a big part of our workforce is contract workers that work with us event to event. Some of them pretty much stick with us the whole summer. Sometimes they're with us for a timeframe, maybe a month or two, and sometimes they just like jump in here and there for specific events 

[00:17:53] Dominique: If you were to try to summarize, 'cause you obviously know so much about this space and what's impactful and you've built a really strong system. But if you were to think about one small learning takeaway for our listener, maybe from thinking about your volunteers in the past or event coordinators you've worked with, what's something that you wish people understood better 

[00:18:09] Tyler: I think there are so many facets to the work we do. But I think the main thing really is just pick up after yourself please. We are here to do this work and to clean the site, but it is so much more helpful if you just don't put stuff on the ground or like leave it behind, like use the bins in place. We put up like flags on all of our main collection stations around the event that says, "Waste station" and it's color coded with our colors and sort of pointing down at the bins beneath it. It's like 12 or 14 feet tall or something. And the purpose of that is so that like you can see it over a crowd or you can, "I'm finished with my beer", take a quick look around and see like, "Okay, there's the nearest station." And just trying to make that as easy as possible. 

[00:18:54] Dominique: Yeah. And I think even just noticing like I, for any listener I think like next concert you go to or event, look around when you're all heading out .

[00:19:02] Tyler: One of the things we try to do is like, as soon as the show is over, like the last band, we try to rush up there and be like in the crowd bags, opening up, bring a lot of energy and speed to the cleanup, like immediately as soon as we can get in there. And a lot of times, folks on their way out will be like, "Oh, you got another bag? Like, I'll fill one up too." So that's always really fun to like see that engagement and if there's 20 people doing that, it gets cleaned up in no time, like many hands really does make quick work. 

[00:19:29] Adam: What's in the future for Zero Waste Event Productions?

[00:19:32] Tyler: We are looking at another big season next year. This year I think we did 38 festivals and events. I think we worked across 13 states this year. Next year, we are gonna do most likely, pretty much everything we did this year and then some. We are working with one of our long-term partners has like a traveling festival that is hosted in several different cities. and next year we're talking with them about doing all 12 of their festivals across the circuit. 

 The hope is that we'll be able to put together like a kit, an equipment package specifically for them and like put it on their semi-truck to travel around with their stage equipment and everything else. 

the challenge there is it takes a lot of time and energy and capacity away from the rest of our season. So we not only need to expand our equipment and capacity to do those, but we need to reinforce our capacity at other events too. it's tricky but it's unique because they take a two month break in the middle of the summer, and July tends to be the month where we have all of our largest projects, back to back to back. 

 off season, we will be turning some attention back to the plastic shop. We tend to make a bunch of stuff in November and early December, and we sell at a couple holiday fairs, which is cool. And we get to have a display of shredded plastics and it's a very colorful booth because we're using all the prettiest plastics if that's a thing. And showing the lifecycle of how something can go from essentially a waste product to a new product, all within our community. This year, started developing an app that we use as a tool on site for events. Mostly so far it's been a mapping application for like when we set out bins and stations, some of these events we're bringing, six or 700 different bins of different types. As we're setting equipment, we're able to set down different symbols on our interactive map that everybody has on their phone. And when somebody does an update, it updates across the board. 

It's been very helpful. that'll be a big tool next year too, to be able to pull up the map and see how we set it up the year before, kind of have that baseline knowledge. So we're gonna continue to work with this app developer who's a friend of ours, and we want to add like, inventory tracking features. We're really gonna try to push and have like a data tracking section. We used to do everything pen and paper on like a notebook. Can't tell you how many times it got left out in the rain and you're like peeling sheets apart. So this year we started doing it on what we call our trash tablets.So we do like on a Google Doc and then all the data aggregates, it takes a huge step out of the process, kind of transferring from paper. But we wanna be able to do that tracking through the app itself. And then Shannon, who does our reporting, is gonna work closely with this guy to figure out how all that data can just automatically be building these reports that we do.

So that even midway through day one, you could pull up the report and see what the percentages are and what our carbon offset equivalency is even in the first few hours. And also so that report can be finalized and finished as soon as the festival's over we can send it over to the organizers and they can share it with to their social medias and stuff while people are like still really excited about the weekend. If it comes out five days later, a lot of that wave of attention has sort of already passed.

I think we provide the best service on the market, but we can't be everywhere, so we wanna really share the knowledge and the tools and help other people get started too. 

[00:23:04] Dominique: I love how you've like grown from brute force doing the work, but you've been building systems as you go. I think your impact is enormous and congrats so far on turning what was seeing a real problem and doing AmeriCorps work into building a business that literally you're struggling to keep up with. 

I know that you probably see more of the stress around that, but congrats on a lovely problem.

[00:23:26] Tyler: Thank you. It is wild. I spent a few years doing cold calls and tracking down numbers and basically begging organizers to hire us. And we've done a few events where we paid to do it. Like at the end of the event, we ended up losing money for all the work that we did partly because we go above and beyond. And that's part of our model is we don't just throw it in the trash, We make sure we sort everything and try to do it right.

The flip side of that now is I don't do any outreach. Every conversation that starts are people that approach us about our service. Whether they found us online or they heard about another event organizer. Or they were at an event. And that's happened too, people have tracked us down on site and we'll exchange information and start it from there.

 It has been really great. Like we already have 40 events on the books for next year.

It's hard to squeeze more in, it's hard to say no, unfortunately, but we're always expanding our capacity, equipment, and people, but I think because there's so many facets of the work, finding the right people is definitely the biggest challenge. And we don't want to send somebody to a site who's jaded and doesn't actually care about the work, and it maybe isn't providing the level of service that we're proud to put our name on.

We're so glad that you're able to join us today. It's been really fun kind of walking through the whole journey of Zero Waste Event productions, from talking to vendors to all the equipment that you bring on site and what that looks like, to your plans for the future.

[00:24:48] Adam: How can people connect with you and learn more about what you're doing? 

[00:24:50] Tyler: Visit our website, www.zerowastefest.com. There's a bunch of tabs around information around what we do, and if you're hosting your own event, there's some suggestions for things to think about and how to do thatthere's a 'get involved' tab where you can look at the events we have lined up for upcoming seasons, potential volunteer opportunities or opportunities to come and work alongside our team as a contractor or even potentially a seasonal manager to come out for the whole season. You might see us at a couple local holiday fairs this winter. You can follow us on social media pages, @zerowaste_ep, on Instagram and Zero Waste Event Productions on Facebook. See some pictures of the beeramids I've been stacking. When we sort cans out of the waste stream, we're filling these giant bags of cans, and then I've been like stacking them into like nice, really tidy pyramids that I call the 'beeramid'

I wanna start a 'build your own beeramid' campaign where you put your pyramid on the map somewhere and share your picture so all those, European festivals, see how tall you can build your 'beeramid'. 

And check out our social media for an example of what that kind of looks like. 

[00:26:01] Adam: We'll link to some of those pictures in the show notes. as well as the websites. 

[00:26:05] Dominique: Makes me happy.

[00:26:06] Tyler: I'm, yeah, I like to joke that my real job is to build the 'beeramid' and everything else I do is just, so that I can be there to that. 

[00:26:13] Dominique: That's great. Well, thank you for sharing your story with us. Thanks for what you do and I think a lot of our listeners probably are having their eyes opened up to spaces they've already been in and haven't thought about this way. So thank you. 

[00:26:25] Tyler: Thank you for having me.

[00:26:26] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:26:36] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach on our website Music is by Zane Dwe ik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll be digging into our next sustainability success story in our next episode.

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