Keeping Festivals Green

Last week I took my daughter and a friend of hers and my son to the Viva Vienna festival here in NoVa. As one of the oldest Memorial Day community events in the area, Viva Vienna got a lot of things right. But it also got a few things wrong.

First the right stuff. Vienna is sandwiched in between the nightmare that is Tyson's Corner to its east and the relatively calm town of Reston to its west. With very little parking available for the hundreds (and maybe a few thousands) of people who visited over the weekend, the only way to sample the booths of locally made crafts and fresh cooked food was on foot.  That forced a lot of people who wouldn't normally walk more than a few yards from their cars to the front door of the mall to get out there and exercise. Point for Vienna!

And since practically all of the vendors (over priced if you asked me) were local, no one with a green screen for their purchases had to worry about the carbon cost of shipping goods across the country, or worse, from China. Another point for Vienna!

Moreover, what would Memorial Day weekend be without good barbeque, hot dogs and burgers and funnel cake? Not a fun time, that's for sure. So while I had to make sure to log a few extra miles on the trail to avoid packing on a few extra points, another point for V-V getting it right when it came to food.

But with so much good, there had to be something not so great.  The organizers tried to encourage folks to recycle the plastic bottles of water, used lemonade cups and such, but their efforts failed. They fell short mainly because there weren't enough recycling trash containers. Plus anyone who bought some of the great stuff sold by the vendors carried their treasure home in plastic bags. 

Navy Federal Credit Union, the largest credit union in the country and a fast moving mortgage lender, gave away a plastic bag full of junk with their logo. I'm sure that the majority of the stuff wound up in the trash that afternoon or no more than a few days later.

This weekend, the Herndon Festival kicks off its annual rite for summer. I hope that it offers as broad a mix of vendors and food that I won't mind burning off on the trail. But I also hope that it has more recycling bins and encourages its vendors to send us on our way with stuff packed in reusable, earth-friendly shopping bags. And yeah, no plastic doo-dads. We can pick up that stuff at McDonald's -- NOT!