Sustainability headlines at this weekend’s Gasparilla Music Festival

Most festivals and large-scale cultural events these days go to some lengths to reduce their impact on the environment. Recycling barrels have become as commonplace as T-shirt stands.

Taylor Ralph, a Gasparilla Music Festival administrator, believes his event – taking place Saturday and Sunday in downtown Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Park – might just have the edge in avoiding the landfill. “I think we’re in rarified air here in our community,” he says.

Ralph, the chair of the festival’s sustainability committee, explains that the seven-year-old Gasparilla fest has been all about avoiding waste since the beginning. They started with free bicycle valet service – encouraging festival-goers to leave their cars at home.

Then they insisted their food vendors adhere to a no-plastic rule. “We’ve worked with them to make sure they’re actually providing the right materials for the utensils, plates and such,” Ralph says. “Most of those are paper-based products – we educate the vendors about what we expect on-site.”

You won’t be able to buy any bottled water at the Gasparilla Music Festival. Instead, all the water available for purchase comes in milk carton-shaped cardboard boxes. The manufacturer, in fact, is called Boxed Water.

Fans are permitted to bring in bottled water, however, as long as the bottle is sealed. Baby steps.  “We’re doing the best that we can with our footprint,” Ralph says.

Gasparilla also recycles post-consumer food waste. “All of our attendees will have a choice, to throw away their waste products in a city recycling bin, or a composting bin.”

At the end of each day, workers from Whitwam Organics will sort through all the discarded bits of wraps, gyros, falafels and hamburger buns, looking for plastic – or any other “undesirable” materials – that might have slipped through.

With close to 10,000 people expected each day, that’s a lot to dig into. “Our goal,” Ralph explains, “is that there’ll only be a few things that might not be right.”

Through Wigwam, the food waste becomes food compost, donated to non-profit community gardens. “They’ll use that compost to grow food, and donate the food back to the community and those in need,” says Ralph.

The founder and president of REAL Building Consultants, a sustainability consulting company specializing in real estate and home construction, Ralph joined the Gasparilla Music Festival – a production of the non-profit Gasparilla Music Foundation – in its second year.

“We’re primarily made up of locals – a lot of people that were born and raised here, or came back here in their adult lives,” he says. “They decided they wanted to create a music and cultural festival that Tampa Bay would be proud of, a real locally-based festival that celebrated local music as much as national acts.

“And early on, they recognized that they want to be responsible stewards of the community, and minimize the environmental impact of this event.”