Twin Cities Asian Fair Minimal Waste & Sustainability Initiative - JADE

Do you remember the Asian Fair that took place at Hilde Performance Center at Plymouth back on June 1st? It was a memorable event full of Asian culture experience: performance, food, cultural exhibit, merchandise, games etc. All these are festive, and cultural-rich.


One unique thing that took place among all these festivities is the environmental sustainability initiative. It all started with:

“Why did we generate so much waste during a large event like this?” “Maybe we can do something to minimize it.” “Maybe we can use this opportunity to provide more education to general public on the appropriate recycling...”

The end result of this is that for an event with >10,000 participants, 40 volunteers were recruited to staff five trash stations placed around the venue, helping fairgoers to appropriately dispose of waste to organics, recyclable,and plastic bags, before going to trash and landfill. The volunteers also used trash grabbers to re-sort the wrongly disposed trash, ensuring the purity of organic and recycling wastes. The end result is that the event generated around 3920 gallons of trash, we diverted 960 gallons to organics and 1415 gallons to recycling, with an approximate 60.5% diverted from landfill. Without all these efforts, they would all end up going to the landfill. To ensure the purity of the organics and recycling, volunteers not only helped during the event, but also stayed after the event continuing sorting the trash until past 10pm on the event day and then went back the next day wrapping things up. You can see how clean the event place is after all this effort, which was even endorsed by the Panda.


In addition to the waste sorting effort, JADE collaborated with Environmental Quality Committee(EQC)-Plymouth, Hennepin County and United Nations Association Minnesota Chapter (UNA-MN), putting together exhibits to provide resources, ideas and education to the fairgoers.


Kudos to

  • Hennepin County and Plymouth EQC for your strong support and guidance. Big shout to Kira Berglund, Jessica B Nyaribo, Amy N Maas, Kaitlin Keller, Tim Pratt, Ben Scharenbroich, Hue Danny Lee and Joseph Vital
  • Asian Fair organizers for supporting this initiative
  • Jade Environmental Sustainability committee for putting huge efforts, hearts and souls in putting these together, from getting trash company to provide organics recycling bins, to contacting Hennepin and city for guidance, resource sharing and collaboration, to calling and emailing food vendors one by one to encourage using compostable food service wares, to recruit volunteers, to going around the fairground to provide guide and support to volunteers…
  • All the volunteers for donating time doing the dirtiest yet purest job during the event
  • All the fairgoers for listening, collaborating, practicing and appreciating volunteers

Altogether we made this event a much cleaner one, we did very down to the earth work, yet planted seeds in so many people’s hearts! We also earned a lot of respect and support and made friends with commons goals from variety ethnic backgrounds: people stopped by praising our effort and taking pictures; an Indian lady approached us after her performance wanting to be part of this, and brought her daughter to the event ground finishing cleaning the next day; a boy scout 8th grade student not only helped the event together with an army of scouts friends during the event, but also answered our call for help without hesitation and came the next day; a Somalian girl who was taking a walk at the event place, saw us cleaning and volunteered to help us on the spot…


And look at these cute kids, having so much fun picking garbage from the ground putting smiles on their parents as well as all the people around them.



Hennepin County Community Recycling Ambassador Carolyn Wieland is training the volunteers






Volunteers in Action






Environment Sustainability exhibits put together by Hennepin County, Plymouth EQC, UNA-MN and JADE



Tenacious volunteers went back to the event ground finishing waste sorting and cleaning up