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Patrick KingPhoto: Steven Romero of Music City Creative
When you think about climate activists, who comes to mind? Greta Thunberg? Al Gore? A recent study by Yale University’s Climate Change Communication program found that Latino and Black Americans are more likely to be alarmed or concerned about climate change than whites.
“The environmental sector suffers from an alarming amount of whiteness,” says Patrick King, the sustainability education manager of local nonprofit Urban Green Lab. “There’s a perception that it’s a space only for affluent white folks, when in reality, when you look at the numbers, the overwhelming majority of people who believe in climate change and believe that things have to be done around climate change are Black and brown.”
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Recycling sorting at River Hills Recycling CenterPhoto: Eric England
A sound not unlike rain patters incessantly at the back of the open-air building where trucks dump material at Nashville’s River Hills Recycling Center. This is the largest recycling facility in Nashville, and that sound is a thunderstorm of sorts. It’s a steady stream of pill bottles, drink cans, cardboard boxes and other materials hurtling through a large machine called a drum feeder, which sends the items down a conveyor belt to be sorted.
Although operations manager Dilan Vince says the drum feeder can handle about 20 tons of material per hour, not everything that ends up at the River Hills facility is recyclable. In fact, Jenn Harrman, the waste reduction program manager for Metro Public Works, says as much as 46 percent of what Nashville puts into residential recycling bins is unusable. She says that’s a high contamination rate compared to other cities, but Metro is working to educate re
By: Sarah Pittman
Megan Scallorn Channel Tres performs atDeep Tropics in 2019. That year the boutique festival s sustainability efforts included collecting 700 pounds of compost material and sending 300 pounds of non-recyclable plastics and waste to Terra Cycle to be reused to make into other plastic products. festivalReturning in 2021 to safely put on an event would be a lofty enough goal for most festival organizers. But the organizers of Deep Tropics Music Art & Style Festival are determined to take their greening efforts to the next level to become a net positive energy and water event. As Deep Tropics’ website explains, net positive “simply means we create more energy (and water) than we use.”