A Darker Shade of Green, the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen

After reading that the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen has an active green initiative, and “Green Team” volunteers, I became curious.  How green really can events like this be?   Is it truly even possible?

I was lucky to have the opportunity to interview Devin Padgett, the Producer of Special Projects for Food & Wine, and master of all things green.  Here’s the scoop:

“Heidi:  We are here with Devin Padgett of Food & Wine Magazine, Devin, can you tell us about your role in the event?

Devin:  I am the Producer of Special Projects, and this is my 21st Classic.  I direct the Aspen side of the event and work in tandem year round with the New York office team to make this all happen.

Heidi:   I’ve read about your green program in the brochure, and I see the recycle bins everywhere, but can you tell me more about it? What’s new for 2009?

Devin:  It’s a really important initiative for us.  It’s something that we’re really proud to have started.  Probably 14 or 15 years ago we began with recycling glass.  Of course there’s 10’s of thousands of wine bottles that roll through the event.  A successful Classic has lots of empty bottles, right?  We’re pround to be a founding business partner of Wally’s Recycling Service.  So we’ve been recycling for quite a long time now.  About three years ago, we partnered directly with the city of Aspen and the Canary Initiative to really ramp it up and take the next step.  An that was not because it was the popular, politically correct thing to do, but because living here in the Roaring Fork Valley, we live in a community that is charged with doing things the right way.  And we want to be a part of that.   With the Classic, it’s really important for us to try to lead the way in the green event field.  Now with our partnerships, we compost, we recycle,  we have our three tier (recycling) stations at all of our venues.  We have 18-20 recycling stations here in the Wagner Park Grand Tasting area, and not only are they manned by an amazing volunteer green team, but we’ve taken all of this event wide, including our programming venues.  Three years in, and we’ve go a lot of good data working with the Canary Initiative.   One of the things that we’ve put a lot of energy in over the last couple of years is with our registration bag, the gift bag that our audience get when they check in to to get their passes.  We’ve had a lot of heat and pressure over this, because it’s a marketing engine.   We’ve made an active change, and developed a set of criteria to try to fix that.  I’m very proud to say that this year, we’ve lost 10 pounds with our reg bags.  We went from 17.1 lbs in 2008 (last year)  to a little under 7 lbs this year.  Last year the Classic pulled a 67.9% diversion rate.   What that means is that 67.9% of all of our waste generated from the Classic was diverted from the landfill.  To give you a little perspective on that, the city of Aspen annually has a diversion rate of in the mid teens.  So we’re really really proud of that quadruple percentage rate for a 3 day event here in Aspen, and hope to do even better this year.  We have some measureables and really great data that support our efforts.

Heidi:  Great work and your team deserves to be proud!  Thank you Devin for your time!”

So, absolutely a stellar project led by Devin and the numbers prove it. It would be great to see other culinary and musical events in Colorado, and nationwide, follow this impressive example.