2016 IFEA Pinnacle Awards Category: #45 - Best Green Program Entry: Cleanest & Greenest Festival www.RoseFestival.org 2016 IFEA Pinnacle Awards DIVISION: Festival & Event Critical Component CATEGORY: #45 ‐ Best Green Program ENTRY: Cleanest & Greenest Festival 1. Overview Information a. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND OF MAIN EVENT The Portland Rose Festival is a 109‐year tradition making memories for locals and visitors alike each year. The mission of the Portland Rose Festival Foundation is to serve families and individuals with programs and events that promote the arts, education and volunteerism. We value environmental responsibility, diversity, patriotism and our historic and floral heritage. The Foundation has been bringing the community together to celebrate the City of Roses for over a century. As a 501(c)3 non‐profit foundation, the Rose Festival relies on individual and corporate donors to help fund events and programs that support our mission. The Rose Festival’s main events include the electrifying nighttime Starlight Parade, the all‐floral traditional Spirit Mountain Casino Grand Floral Parade, a children’s parade – the Fred Meyer Junior Parade – and CityFair, an urban three‐week fair that features carnival rides, food and concerts for fans of all ages. Environmental responsibility is a well‐known and celebrated tradition in Portland. As Portland’s Official Festival, the Rose Festival has a responsibility to the community to implement green initiatives in all of the events. For 20 years, the Cleanest & Greenest program has provided cleanups after all three parades, as well as environmental and recycling programs at CityFair. All of the Clean & Green Team’s efforts have the objective of keeping Portland’s streets and parks looking their best for everyone to enjoy. The Rose Festival also aims to ensure that festival attendees can make a positive impact on the environment while participating in the events. 2016 marks the 20th year of the Rose Festival's award winning Cleanest & Greenest Program. In 1996, the festival introduced the Cleanest & Greenest program, an unprecedented initiative among volunteer, nonprofit and corporate partners, setting an events industry standard and winning its first gold Pinnacle Award from the International Festival & Events Association in 1997. Over the next 20 years, the Rose Festival collected gold award after gold award for the Best Environmental Program in the world. The program started with an all‐hands‐on‐deck parade cleanup team, partnering with local garbage haulers, recyclers, and the city's maintenance bureau. It grew to incorporate a recycling program at CityFair, carbon offsets for parade cars and carnival rides, alternative transportation measures and green programming throughout the Festival. Today, many thanks to the Rose Festival's early initiatives, events and festivals across the globe incorporate green initiatives through recycling programs, cleanup efforts, and sustainability messaging. Momentum was building this year for a 20‐year celebration. All partners were in place and logistics had been tried and tested over the last two decades. What could go wrong...? b. DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE / OBJECTIVE OF GREEN PROGRAM The Cleanest & Greenest program found its purpose in 1996 as a parade cleanup for the nighttime, illuminated Starlight Parade, deemed to be the 'cleanest parade in America'. Over the next two decades, the program's purpose grew to incorporate green initiatives in all Rose Festival programming including recycling and composting, alternative transportation, renewable energy offsets, and joining forces with many community partners to produce the Best Green Program in the world. In 2016, the program's purpose stayed true, even as the program objectives shifted to address unforeseen challenges. It may have been the curse of Murphy's Law, or just a lesson in Risk Management 101... But if anything can go wrong, it will ‐ and it did. Just weeks before the opening of the Festival, the existing program model faced major challenges. Two key factors left the Festival scrambling to save the 20‐year Cleanest & Greenest program. Three weeks before opening night, our primary garbage hauler and sorter left the team without a location to offload the trash collected at Rose Festival parades, nor a location to sort the material for diverted material. This detriment was coupled with the loss of another partner that provided volunteers and trash bags for the Festival's biggest parade, the Grand Floral Parade. For the first time in 20 years, the Rose Festival used unbudgeted funds to cover expenses to buy and print trash bags for parade cleanup. Whether it was complacency after 20 years of success, or a strike of bad luck, the Festival acted diligently to overcome these challenges in the final days leading up to the 2016 Portland Rose Festival. The setbacks became a driving force to achieve comparable results to the award‐winning program that we had worked hard to build over the last 20 years. The Cleanest & Greenest Program set three new objectives to achieve success in 2016: 1. Maintain existing green initiatives within the Festival's events and programs 2. Implement new programming to promote the 20th year of the Cleanest & Greenest program 3. Save the parade cleanup! c. TARGET AUDIENCE / ATTENDANCE / NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS The target audience for the Portland Rose Festival’s Cleanest & Greenest program includes all of the attendees at the three Rose Festival parades and at CityFair. 2016 Attendance Numbers Starlight Parade: 315,000 Junior Parade: 44,000 Grand Floral Parade: 435,000 CityFair: 185,000 d. WHAT "GREEN" INITIATIVES WERE USED AT EVENT Parade Cleanups Parade cleanups, now an important tradition, were the basis upon which the Cleanest & Greenest program was created in 1996. Prior to each parade, close to 100 volunteers distribute special, branded bags to parade goers along the route to collect their own trash and recycling. After the parades, volunteers hit the route again to collect the bags and any loose debris. The Rose Festival relies on the support of local service providers that donate their time and resources to help with parade cleanups. This year's cleanup posed additional challenges when the primary hauler/sorter backed out just three weeks before the festival opened, and the cost of trash bags for the parade viewers was dumped on the nonexistent festival budget. Environmental Programs at CityFair Strategies for recycling paper, plastics, glass and cooking oil at the 2016 CityFair were a great success, diverting 3.5 tons of material that would have otherwise been sent to the landfill! Event staff went to extreme measures to provide contamination training sessions to all food vendors, explaining the delicate process for composting food scraps from their booths. Food composting bins were located behind each of the fifteen food vendor booths for easy disposal, collecting 1.11 tons of recyclable organics. CityFair food vendors collected oil from their deep fryers along with other sources for pick up by Oregon Oils, which amassed 2.5 tons of recyclable cooking oil that will be converted into fuel. And for those festival‐goers whose eyes were bigger than their stomachs, there were clearly marked trash and recycling stations for the last bites of giant elephant ears, foot‐long corn dogs and additional recoverable waste. Almost a full ton of glass recycling was collected this year, and 1.67 tons of paper and plastic products were recycled during the event's 12‐day run. Water Sustainability Initiative Rose Festival provided many ways for guests to stay cool amid weather in the triple digits during the second week of festival fun. Rose Festival offered free water refill stations for guests at the waterfront's CityFair and along the Starlight Parade route. The water stations were provided for public use with personal reusable water bottles. No disposable cups were provided to cut down on waste. The stations used water conservative faucets featuring point‐on‐demand shut off instead of continuous flow. Volunteers were assigned to man each station, ensuring proper use of the stations and helping to spread the word about this effort to "beat the heat". Managing Paper Waste Each year the Rose Festival prints 10,000 copies of the annual Souvenir Program for festival guests to learn about upcoming events and programs. Each program is an average of 70‐pages, acting as a guide to each season for fans and tourists alike. In 2016, the Festival cut the printed order by 20% and instead published the program electronically online, which not only bettered our ability to measure from a marketing perspective of 'views' and 'click‐throughs', but, more importantly, bettered the environment. e. HOW WERE INITIATIVES PROMOTED TO THE PUBLIC? This year Rose Festival audiences were introduced to the three new mascots of the Cleanest & Greenest program! The Green Stooges were created to help celebrate 20 years of award‐winning Rose Festival parade cleanups. The Green Stooges clowned around on all three parade routes using slapstick comedy to spread the green message to parade goers. They carried trash bags and performed skits demonstrating how to place parade route garbage in the bags. The Festival introduced the Green Stooges to the public on social media and in printed collateral, but their message was most effective along the parade route as the cleanups were happening, and filmed on each live telecast by our partners at KPTV Fox 12. The Rose Festival website features a page dedicated to our Cleanest & Greenest program’s efforts: http://www.rosefestival.org/programs/cleanest‐greenest. The Rose Festival introduced Cleanest & Greenest tips on the website. Slogans like "Less is MORE" and "Pack it in, Pack it out" were used to encourage parade‐goers to join the initiative to keep Portland clean. The web‐based volunteer application includes a sign‐up for Starlight Parade cleanup efforts: http://www.rosefestival.org/support/volunteer. The 2016 Rose Festival Souvenir Program included one page covering the Cleanest & Greenest program ‐ A copy is included in the Supporting Materials.