Truly Garbage Design

One of the things I’ve always loved about the Austin City Limits music festival is how clean the grounds are, despite the fact that sixty thousand people gather there, eating, drinking, smoking, and anything else your imagination can conjure up.  Throughout the festival the rolling green grounds remain relatively free of debris.  How can this be?  The designers of the festival are very intentional about how they handle garbage, designing a system that works on many different levels.  As an organizational/cultural systems kind of guy, these are right in my wheelhouse.  Here are a few of my favorite things.

 

The first and most basic design decision is the strategic placement of garbage and recycling receptacles.  They are not so cumbersome that you run into them at every turn.  In fact, when you don’t need them you hardly notice their existence.  When you do need one, it seems there is always a bin within 100 feet of wherever you are.  I suspect great thought has been put into the spacing and the placement because it just works so well.  Also, the bins are rarely full.  They have devised a magic elf-like system of emptying the full bins such that I’m not even sure how they do it throughout the day.

 

The most interesting aspect of the ACL garbage design is the use of volunteer collectors.  For years I’ve noticed that people just seem to wander the grounds with clear, 40 gallon, plastic bags, filling them with cans, plastics, and other recyclables.  These people don’t wear clothing that distinguish them as volunteers or employees of the festival.  They look like everyone else.  What is going on here?  

 

I came to discover that volunteers can get a T-shirt if they fill a recycling bag.  As a result of this program, an army of people take a portion of their 3-day festival experience to walk around collecting bottles and cans that would otherwise litter the ground.  It’s actually fun to watch.  Everyone seems to know and appreciate what is going on, so people go out of their way to help fill the bags.  Both the people collecting the trash and the people discarding the trash are incredibly grateful for the transaction.  

 

Over the years I’ve noticed the participants are getting younger and younger.  Yesterday I saw a girl dragging around a recycling bag who couldn’t have been a day over 10.  At capacity the bag was going to be bigger than her.  It was so cool to see this and I was struck on several levels.  

 

Was this a budding entrepreneur who discovered a way to earn a t-shirt while doing an hour’s worth of honest work?  What a great lesson in the work-reward equation.  It reminded me of my early days delivering newspapers.  Only good things come from first-hand experience of doing work that you are paid to do.  

 

She could also be a passionate caretaker of the environment.  Maybe this youngster would be collecting garbage even if there was no t-shirt involved because she appreciates a clean, sustainable planet.  I can’t help but think this was part of the equation for her.  After all, her parents would likely buy her as many t-shirts as she would ever need.  

 

I was also struck by the level of independence this girl had.  Granted, the ACL festival is a pretty safe, family-friendly environment.  But it struck me as unusual for a girl of her age to be wandering around a bunch of strangers.  I can’t say for sure that her parents were not keeping a watchful eye on her from a safe distance, but there it makes for a better story to think she was off exploring the world on her own.  

 

I heard an interesting podcast (I apologize that I can’t remember which) where the speaker suggested that since about the mid-90s that kids rarely have “unsupervised” time in their lives.  His theory was that as the trend moved towards families having fewer children the level of protectionism has increased. This checks out with my experience as I observe my young nieces and think about how their childhood experience compares to my own.  I swear by the age of 10 I was running, riding, and bussing all around the city, completely unsupervised.  At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old man, I worry about how the trend towards constant supervision will shape future generations.  

 

I could probably go on for days and days about the intentionality that went into the garbage design at the ACL, but I suspect you’ve got better things to do.  I’ll leave you to your day with a few simple parting thoughts…

 

 

Prosperous Journey,

-zog