How New Orleans is Tackling the Enormous Waste of Mardi Gras

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Overruled podcast brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law office. We’re here on a very cold morning here in New Orleans. We have a slight bit of ice so we shut down everything for two days and sent everybody home. So, we’re recording a little differently today. I’m on the North Shore and things look a little different. I’m Brad Scott and today we have co-hosting the amazing Kaitlyn Carrigan. How are you today, Kaitlyn?

Wonderful, but freezing. Hi everyone. Hope everyone’s staying warm today.

Have you defrosted it at all on the South Shore yet?

No, not in the least. We are in the office, but not defrosted. Kids are still out of school. So, like I mentioned, we are surviving, not thriving. I’m sure there’s quite a few of us in the same boat today too.

Hopefully we can get some warm king cake in our belly. I think we’ll be good, especially for this episode because we have a very special guest today. His name is Brett Davis. He’s the founder of Grounds Crew. It’s a New Orleans 501C3 nonprofit organization. And you may have seen these guys out there after parades. They’re a lot of times grabbing these beads. They have some of the waste, disposal type things. They’re into waste prevention, recycling, and sustainable products. So, Brett, welcome to the show. We’re excited to have you, especially Kaitlyn’s excited to have you. How are you doing today? Are you staying warm down there?

Yeah, I’m good. I’m, I’m warm enough. Yeah, I’m keeping up with it. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

We’re glad to have you. So, tell us a little bit about Grounds Crew. Give us a little intro to what you guys do and, kind of how you got started.

Sure. Yeah, so Grounds Crew, as you mentioned, 501C3 nonprofit. I actually started it in 2019. I, am born and raised in New Orleans. I’ve been going to Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, all these events here all my life and watched them change a little bit as time has progressed since when I was a kid and really found that there was a, a need out there that needed to be addressed. And I’ve always had a, a proclivity towards conservation and protecting the environment. I actually went to the LSU Landscape Architecture Masters program. Studied a lot about coast to restoration, but I didn’t have a science or engineering background to plug into. So I started looking for issues that were happening right here in New Orleans that were environmentally focused and something I felt like I could plug into. And so, yeah, started researching the Mardi Gras waste issue, realizing that not a whole lot was being done about it. And so, started putting together, just, you know, some research on who was doing what and as things progress, they do, you know, you never know what you’re going to get started with. Here I am five years later and it’s my full-time job. And yeah, our big focus is on making all the events that we have in New Orleans more sustainable through lowering their waste impact. As you guys know, it’s New Orleans, we love to party. We are having a good time just about all the time. But there’s not always a big focus on sustainability and waste prevention and it’s more just like, hey, let’s have a great time and we’ll, you know, figure it out later. Whatever the, the beneficial thing to do is for the environment.

Especially Mardi Gras. And, and we mentioned this before we got on the air, but I mean, after a parade passes, I always find myself kind of looking around and need the volume of garbage and trash that people just leave behind. You know, it’s that one time of year where people, I just, they feel like they have a pass for like trashing the city, I guess, and leaving everything behind instead of picking up by themselves. But, you know, what kind of volume of trash goes through New Orleans on a typical Mardi Gras? Do you have any of these kind of stats and numbers? I’m sure they’re mind boggling.

Well, I can say. Yeah. Yeah. Three tons usually ends up in my household. So, we can probably express that too.

In the hallway. It stays in the hallway for a little while and then might go up to the attic and then, yeah, who knows where it ends up. A toy box. But yeah, no, I have all the stats. Two point six million pounds of trash is produced just in the streets and about 12 days of Carnival. So, of course, that’s not all the waste that’s generated during Mardi Gras. That is just what is bulldozed into piles on the streets, in our neighborhoods, put into dump trucks and driven straight from the parade route out to the landfill. So, it’s a pretty shocking amount. And again, it wasn’t like that when I was a kid. So, something has changed dramatically over time and, it’s a sort of a compelling story, I think, as to why it’s gotten to be that way. And the short answer is, is Mardi Gras is the largest free and unsponsored event in the entire world. It is the only event where you don’t buy a ticket to go see it. You don’t have a big telecom company or bank or oil and gas company saying, let’s throw some money at this thing and sponsor it or put it on. It is the only event in the world where the people entertaining, aka the big, float crew riders are actually paying to entertain the crowd. So all of this requires money to do this, a lot of money. It’s a free show. So, the way that money is generated to put on these crews, these parades is through membership dues. Of course, balls and fundraisers, but more and more and more, it is about the importation, crew branding, highly markup sale of packages of imported disposable plastic beads and trinkets. That is, almost, it can account for almost 50% of a of a cruise revenue now. So, that is why there’s so much stuff out there. They’re very competitive with each other, these parading organizations. Mardi Gras wants to get bigger and better every year. So, how do you pay for this thing to grow? The million LED lights, the tandem floats, the moving parts, the best bands, warehouses, all year long, you have to do that by selling a bunch of stuff to the people in your parade, having them throw it and, and then that’s where the money comes from. But the problem is, we’ve reached a tipping point, I think, where there’s just so much out there that’s being thrown, that the demand for it has dropped. And that’s why all this 2.6 million pounds of waste on the street, if you look at the profile of it, a lot of it is like your typical tailgating waste, but more and more and more, my guess is about 70% of it is neglected, unwanted parade throws. And you used the word disposable. We’re bringing in tons of disposable items for throws, but disposable is not biodegradable. There’s a big difference between those two things. So, you know, I think that’s kind of where you guys come in and what your mission is. Tell us a little bit about that and kind of what you guys are doing to help this problem or address this problem. How are you guys coming at it?

So, the way Grounds Crew actually got started was going out onto the parade route and you might be familiar with Arc of Greater New Orleans or a great nonprofit. They are there for folks with intellectual disabilities. They have a big Mardi Gras recycling center where they actually take in donations of throws year round that they’ve re-sort, by hand, re-package and sell to support the services they provide for their members. Well, we approached them and we said, you really need to get out on the parade route. You gotta make it as easy as possible for the parade going public to get this stuff back into your hands. So, our first initiatives and Grounds Crew were to go out and recycle and reuse throws out on the parade route. And really build a presence and a connection and people’s minds that they had something to do with these throws after the fact. And that was very successful. Arc has really grown that operation. It really sustains their work. But over time, it started to occur to me that, wait a second, all we’re really doing here is reusing the same stuff.

Repurposing the same trash.

Right. And it’s still coming from, factories in East Asia. It’s still covered in all these really toxic materials. The plastic in these beads is degraded from other products. It’s covered with nail polish grade paint. Funky, not good for our children to, to handle or people with intellectual disabilities. So, I started to shift more of my focus over to, well, if I went to a parade beyond a bead, what could I actually catch that is environmentally friendly, affordable, and hey, could it possibly come from a company in the US or even better, Louisiana? So, we started this idea with the sustainable throw catalog. And, you know, it is very hard to come up with throw ideas that are cost competitive with imported disposable plastic and foreign manufacturing. So, what do we have here in Louisiana that is, ubiquitous and cheap? And promotes, you know, our culture. Well, things like red beans, Jambalaya mix, coffee, you know, consumable items, little things that we can package, throw to people that they can use them, they can catch them again. So, functional throws and done in very environmentally sensitive packaging. So, that’s how the sustainable throw catalog got started and then it’s just really increased in popularity over time. We started just by selling stuff online. We do direct to crew orders now, as well as the online catalog. And we sold about 415,000 throws as a nonprofit of about one and a half people, in the last three seasons. So, we’re very, very proud of that.

Well, funny story now that you mentioned that, Brett. During the freeze over the weekend and yesterday, naturally we would run out of coffee at my house at the perfect timing. And so, open the freezer and low and behold, I had a small little packet of a sustainable Mardi Gras throw that was a packet of coffee. It was, it was an absolute lifesaver. And so, really, I think it was fate that we were here talking to you today because I really do have such a, a passionate side about what y’all are doing with these throws. And you brought up a really interesting point, that I too, as a, as a Mardi Gras native had noticed over the years is that what we caught is children, and when you got those really highly sought after throws, they were, you know, they were rarer. Back on the parade route. Whereas now, you know, my kids come home with 15 different swords, that inevitably go to a donation site or mounds and mounds and mounds of beads. And not just small ones, but like the big ones. You know, the ones that you would fight after as kids. And one of the things that I thought you brought up was really interesting, that I can imagine is a hurdle in what y’all are trying to achieve is that the branding by the crews for some of these throws, has just far exceeded what it what it used to be, even what five, ten years ago. I don’t think we had noticed it to that point. And I had actually looked into it a little bit last year. And one of the things that I was told is that some crews prohibit their crew members from reusing their old branding items. You know, and I can imagine why from a, a publicity standpoint and a keeping up with the rest of the crew standpoint, but how does that impact what y’all are trying to do in conjunction with the crews to try to get them on board to say, yeah, we get that you want a specialty throw, but at the same time, is there any way we can, we can reduce that consumption and in some sort of fashion?

Yeah. Well, one of the things, again, to keep in mind is that the crews selling these items, year to year to year is sort of what they have become. This is really in relation to the super crews, I should mention. This is what they rely on to put on these huge, huge spectacles again, for free to the public. So, that’s probably one of the reasons why they’re, you know, really pushing, hey, let’s, let’s keep, you know, buying and throwing, buying and throwing. There’s also, of course, at every level of economy, someone making money in the middle. We do have crews where some of the captains also own throw distribution companies. So, of course, they want to keep the status quo going, more and more and more. Maybe you’ve heard the slogan throw till it hurts. At one parade, well, that parade, the captain of that parade also owns the largest throw distribution company in Louisiana. So, yeah, there are a few things that have kept the ball rolling, in terms of just the volume and the push for the excess, you know. But I think what I’m hearing from the riders and the people out on these parades is that, you know, the experience is starting to get devalued a little bit. Because of course, scarcity creates demand. When you’re throwing something on the float, you want someone to want to catch it, you want them to make an effort to catch it. You don’t want to see your, you know, your bead, your throw, whatever you just paid good money for, hit the ground and be ignored. And the same goes for the people watching these parades, you know, they want to have a connection with someone. They don’t want just a, you know, someone not even looking over the side of the float and just throwing stuff as fast as they can. And I think, you know, to be honest, that’s probably why some of these other smaller, more neighborhood parades have proliferated over the last few years. I’m talking about the Marigny, the Bayou, Tchoupitoulas, those things. They’re really about spectacle and craft and so much less about the transaction of throwing stuff. And that is how all of Mardi Gras used to be, actually. There’s a great photo that I show in some of my presentations, the Rex parade, circa maybe 1915 or so, and it’s on Canal Street, and there are hundreds of thousands of people out on Canal Street watching the Buffgrah come around. Every person has their hands in their pockets. They are not there to catch anything. They’re there to witness it, you know. So, I think we need to edge back towards that a little bit. Bring a little bit more quality over quantity back into these throws. But again, we have to figure out the sort of economics of it. Well, if the city hosts Mardi Gras, there is no sponsor, we don’t ever want to be the Macy’s Day Parade. We don’t want to ever want to catch Red Bull or, you know, advertisements on Frisbees off the float. Well, then how do we pay for this whole huge thing to happen? So, it’s, it’s an economic issue or conundrum, really.

Just bring back the moon pies. That’s all I ask.

Those are the rarity these days. Well, and Brett, I’ll actually have, do I understand that y’all actually have, they’re called the Trash Formers? Y’all are your own crew as well?

Yeah. So, yeah, we have really three initiatives around Mardi Gras. The out on the route parade recycling program, which I’ll talk about, that in a second. The sustainable throw catalog, which I’ve been mentioning. And then our third thing is the Trash Formers, marching through. We’re an interactive recycling marching group. We’ll all dress up in eco-pun costumes. I’m Oscar the Grouch, but I live in a recycling bin instead of a trash can. My partner is Marie Cantwitt, she’s got a big wig of, local beer cans. And what we do is with these shopping carts, that have like big kid bike wheels, some of them welded to bicycles, we parade through the quarter and we get people to, hurry up and, I guess you call it chug, whatever they’re drinking and put their can into our cart so that we can recycle it for them. So, that’s a lot of fun and something that we enjoy doing every year. And it really also kind of feeds into this awareness idea of, well, where are you going to put that can since the city doesn’t, you know, offer any sort of public recycling during Mardi Gras. Let us do it for you. And we flip the script on parading by reducing waste at a parade instead of producing waste at a parade.

It seems like the city, I mean, let’s say they kind of threw the towel on it, but there’s just so much trash. You don’t, there’s not enough trash and recycling receptacles that are spread out during Mardi Gras to handle this kind of volume. So, it’s like they’re almost admitting that we’re going to be defeated by this and we’re just going to shovel this stuff in the streets and ushered out to the landfills. So, from a, from a bigger, I don’t know if you have any input on this, but more from a more of a policy side, you know, for the people up there in the city hall and city hall that are kind of looking at things going into the future. How do they make an impact? What recommendations do you have, like for our city leaders and things like that, to maybe, you know, put a cap on this thing. Some kind of way or make it better for our environment.

Well, I told you I was full of stats. We spend about $1.5 million in those 12 days. The Orleans Parish does, aka the taxpayers, just on sanitation costs alone. And that’s just what we pay to get all the stuff off the parade route, over to the landfill. And another shocking stat. The parades that are in the that, that 12-day window, the most they pay to the city of New Orleans for their parade permit is $1,500. So, the super crews, $1,500. Smaller ones about $750. If you’re outside of that window where the city of New Orleans is hosting a larger parade, say your Tchoupitoulas, you’re paying about $16,000 for your parade permit. So, it’s a little weird that, you know, again, we’re totally all about hosting this event, where sort of, for the most part, sort of ignoring the waste issue, paying to clean it up. But you’re right. Something really needs to be done at the municipal level. Because it is, it’s sort of embarrassing to be honest. I mean, this is one of the world’s most important cultural events. And we’re here, you know, in New Orleans, we’re not trying to reduce the number of plastic drinking straws we’re using. We’re importing 25 million pounds of trinkets for fun and using them to fund these parades and throwing them on the ground and then walking away and letting the city clean it up and coming out the next morning and just saying, oh, you know, I don’t see any trace of anything. Out of sight, out of mind. That isn’t a good system. And, you know, one other thing to mention is that there’s a very high probability that over time, there’s going to be some tariff or imported goods from China. Tariff on imported plastic goods from overseas that are disposable. So, we really do need to be thinking about, okay, what sort of things can we look to, as our way out of this scenario. Because it may not just be us that is changing this on a grassroots level. It could be some serious, serious problem with the cost of throws that we import, where they triple or quadruple in one year. And then all of a sudden, Mardi Gras has a funding problem.

Yeah, problems are always quicker, well, easier and less expensive to solve on the front end than waiting for them to become an emergency. So, yeah, I think you, you have a very good point there that this is something that is on the horizon. Yeah, we can’t just do this indefinitely the way we’re doing it. So, let’s get ahead of it and let’s start making some change now if we can, start maybe putting some policies in place to do that. And that’s great. Just to go back real quick, you mentioned Arc before, you know, as far as the, the Mardi Gras bead recycling. Our firm has gotten involved in a prior year with them. We actually sent our whole, firm down there and went to sort those beads. So, there’s lots, I just want to give a shout out to them that there’s lots of volunteer opportunities for people who may want to go out there and help them do that process and sort those beads and, you know, participate in that kind of way. What other ways do you see, like, you know, just the general public can get more involved and be a little bit more proactive, even through volunteering or just maybe different ways they act during Mardi Gras. What are some, some things you could share with us on that?

I’m trying to get us trash formers.

Yeah, right here. There you go. Now, we have an open call.

You just got to come up with a clever eco-pun costume.

Yeah, we actually, I should mention, our sustainable throw catalog, we subsidize the cost of these throws. Again, because we realize we can’t make them at scale with factories and workers. We do that, by engaging thousands of volunteers every year throughout the city. So, high school groups, corporate groups, conferences in town. But we also work with Arc, you know, where we pay them to do very simple assembly of our throws. And if I may show you what that means. So, here’s a bag of four ounce Jambalaya mix that comes from Jambalaya Girl, an awesome local company. Because there is an ordinance that says, you can’t have anything in a parade that conveys a commercial message, we have to get this bag special from her without her branding on it. So, what we do is we get volunteers, thousands at a time, to put a little sticker on one half of the bag that just says Jambalaya Mix, made in Louisiana, nothing trademarked there. It tells a little anecdote about where Jambalaya mix comes from, why it’s culturally important to us. We fold this bag in half, and we’ll stick it inside of a little jute bag like this. This one’s the popcorn bag, but we have one that’s for Jambalaya. And we’ll do that 30,000 times in one season using volunteer help. And that helps reduce the cost of this throw, of course. And we have on all of our throws, QR codes that tell a unique story about the brand that it came from, the Louisiana company, it shows photo galleries of all the volunteers that we’ve engaged with. It talks about the environmental benefits of the throw, and then we’ll do is at the bottom of this webpage, we show our sponsor information, who helped, you know, support and subsidize our costs to make this happen. Our warehousing, our transportation, our utility bills. And we feel like that’s a tasteful way to sort of bridge this, yes, we can have some sponsors help underwrite the cost of sustainable throws that then make it into parades without the sponsors going directly to the parades. So that’s one way that we.

Yeah, I just want to ask a question. How do you start out and find local partnerships? Is that something they, like how do you approach them and sell this to say, hey, we want you to make all these items, but you can’t promote yourself, on the bag because that’s obviously probably a huge selling point. What is that?

We, we would hear for you.

Right.

Yeah. No, that is, it’s actually a challenge. The way that we do it, of course, we first, we lead off with the fact that we’re nonprofit. We are not trying to resell your stuff with our brand on it for a big markup. We want to engage with your brand, attach it to this idea about, you know, supporting a local sustainable throw industry that is better for the environment and better for the storm drains, by American, by local, health and safety. And we want you brand company ABC to think of the stuff that you sell us at a very, and we buy it, we don’t ask you to donate it. Think of it as like business cards going out off the side of a float. Because if someone really likes this bag of Jambalaya, they’re going to scan that QR code, and then they’re going to see, oh, this came from Kristen Pro, Jambalaya Girl, born and raised in New Orleans, sells her stuff at every Rouses, Walmart in the region. Then they can go out and buy that stuff. So, we want them to think of it as a marketing opportunity, not as a big retail year-round sales opportunity. Got it. Okay. What other, if you don’t mind me asking, what other kind of sustainability sustainable goods do y’all have in your catalog? Do y’all have Scott Vicknair cookie, by any chance?

Sure. Yeah. Is there any samples we can get?

Yeah, I’d love to give you some. Probably, let’s see, I’ll go through some of our more popular ones. This is Mardi Gras colored soap. I found a lady on Etsy in Port Allen, Louisiana, who had just started a soap company as a sort of a side hustle. I asked her if she could make something purple, green and gold with biodegradable glitter in it. And she said, let me see if I can try it out. And she’s thinking I’m going to order, you know, 10 to 12 of them. I think I’ve bought about 30, 35,000 bars from her in the last three years. Great, you know, entrepreneurial story. We’ve got little bamboo toothbrushes, that are purple, green and gold bristles, you know, bamboo being fully biodegradable and compostable. One of our new throws for this year is a, this is a little jar of hand scrub that comes in.

Alright, so it’s made with sugar and it’s got a lemon scent to it. I went to a Crawfish Boil last spring and next to the hose bib where people are washing their hands, someone had this little jar of stuff to get the seafood smell out of your hand. And I looked at the brand and said, I’m gonna make that. It’s a Mardi Gras throw. Found these ladies in racing Louisiana and now we’re doing a few thousand of these per year. So, it’s a lot of stuff like that. I won’t go through all of them, but check out the online catalog, groundscru.org. So if you don’t mind telling us a little bit about your crew partnerships, because I, I have seen some of these with some of the crews and really admire them for stepping outside the normal realm of, I’m just going to buy millions of tons of hot pink gigantic beads. How do you go about convincing the crews that this is something that they want to encourage their riders to do? Well, our biggest crew partnership right now is with the Krewe of Iris. I’ve not surprisingly at all that the ladies are, you know, most, progressive, forward-thinking people. They’re the most interested in their kids handling safe things with that they catch out on the, the parade route. So, actually, what we did at Ground Screw was we thought, okay, what would be the perfect parade, the most ideal parade for us to have our throws in? We want it to be a day parade, our throws don’t, you know, have light up, disposable, battery-thing. They’re out of the very harmful to kids, FYI. Yep, you’re right. We want it to be, mostly local people that ride in it, because we know that they’re the most invested in protecting our streets, storm drains, landfills. We knew that women would probably be the most likely to, buy quality products instead of, hey, let’s throw as much stuff as we can, you know, the good old boys. And so we actually reached out to Iris to the captain, just cold-called her and said, hey, you know, we have a throw catalog, can I drop some samples off? And to her credit, Kristen Danfloss, the captain, she said, I want to give this a shot. I want to engage with this. I feel like I’m hearing it a lot from my riders. And so we got started with them. This is going to be our third year doing a package for Iris. And there they’ve just been a real pleasure to work with. But we also work with other crews, like Krewe of Vala, Okeanos, Excelsior, some of the, a lot of the walking crews. And then we sell a lot of stuff online to people in every parade. So, there are some parades where the throws are gonna start coming in from the bottom up, you know, rider, each rider is starting to buy more and more and more until the captain says, okay, we need to get involved in this transaction. There’s going to be other parades where it comes from the top down, like Iris, where they say, we want to get behind this, we want to support the local, sustainable throw economy. We’re going to take, you know, a risk here. And they’ve sold out of their package every year. So, it’s proven to be a really good move for them. That’s amazing. That is, that’s really great to hear. Because there was some kind of way to, you know, like the public and, you know, awareness is everything. That’s what we’re having you on the show today, but no, us as a, a culture, as a people in the city, we need to be a little bit more vigilant about it as well. And some of that can demand can come from us ourselves, holding these, these, these crews and stuff a little bit more accountable. Like, this is what we expect from you guys. We don’t want y’all polluting our landfills and creating these tons of waste. So, you know, I don’t know if social media is the tool to get that message out there to people to make them more aware of that. If y’all have, you know, hashtags that y’all use to help promote these things, but, you know, I think that type of push can really drive something like this, you know, just coming straight from the people. But, you know, and kind of going back to the beginning of the show, you talked about, like the early days of Mardi Gras, those old pictures of the Rex parade coming down Canal Street and how everybody’s hands were in their pockets. I mean, I remember as a kid myself, you think you went to the parade, you didn’t expect to come back with a whole bag of beads. You know, if you got a couple of things, you were doing great. You don’t see a whole lot of, you know, coconuts left on the ground during the parade routes. You know, we, we want to maybe value these throws a little bit more, and I think, you know, the more people just want the crap thrown at them, the more they’re going to get thrown at them. So, supply and demand. So, I think, you know, getting that message out to people that, you know, what is Mardi Gras really about? It’s about our heritage, it’s about our culture and also preserving our city, you know, not just trashing it for the most part. So, all great information. So, where, where can people kind of link up or even get, volunteer with your, your group? Yeah, so if you go to our website, you’ll see, you know, coverage of all of our different initiatives, ways that you can reach out to us to get involved. I can tell you that our sustainable throw assembly, our biggest need is from the fall all the way up through Mardi Gras. So, just yesterday, we had two different groups of volunteers come into the office and, help make stuff. But I should mention, we also have the recycled that initiative. So, this is the latest iteration of again, what I started in the first thing we did in 2019. Getting out on the parade route and engaging the public to let them recycle throws, aluminum and now glass. So, the initiative we have this year is actually in partnership with the City of New Orleans, and several other sponsors in New Orleans and company, Greater New Orleans Foundation, Entergy. And what we’re going to do, this is during the weekend, day parades, we’re going to have six stations set up along the route, about 10 blocks apart from Magazine and Napoleon, all the way down to Harmony Circle. And at these stations, you can get the, the Crawfish sacks that are, for throw donations. Grab one, hang it on your ladder, fill it full of stuff while you parade, bring it back to our station or scan the QR code on the bag to see where you can drop it off anywhere in the greater New Orleans region throughout the year. We’re going to have aluminum can receptacles set up every single block, over that I think it’s about 40 blocks or so, or 60 blocks. All of that aluminum scrap value is going to be brought to the EMR scrap yard in Mid-City. And the value of that is actually going to be doubled by one of our sponsors, and the value of the scrap is going to be dispersed to three local non-profits, the Pontchartrain Conservancy, Zeus’s Rescue and Nola Canine Cuisine. So, public, please drink a lot of beer, recycle, recycle your beer cans with us. And then we’re also going to be collecting the glass out there. But we are asking for additional, we have some money to finally pay staff this year to do this work instead of the entire thing being mostly volunteers. But we still want to engage and bring on extra volunteers to help get out there, put on a vest, go talk to the parade going, public, let them know about our stations and what we’re trying to do. It’s a very hard initiative. It’s a three-mile long event through an urban environment, a little strip, trying to capture all the waste out there is really, really, really tough. But if we’re not out there doing it, nobody else is. So, we gotta give it our best shot every year. You gotta start somewhere. Yeah, exactly. What’s the domain again? Let’s go ahead and give everybody the domain in case they want to look this up and get involved. Sure. Ground, WW W. Browns crew, and that’s K R E W E. Dot org. Groundscru.org. At Ground Screw on Instagram and I believe it’s the same on Facebook. Yeah. And one question too for you, Brett, can, like, without being a group, you know, can individuals come and sign up to volunteer at the office and assembly? It’s, you know, you bring your kids, you, that kind of thing to have them take part in this? Yeah, we try to keep the minimum group size about eight or ten people just for efficiency. But especially in the fall, if you give us, you know, a few days advance notice, we would love to have groups of any size come in for any duration. We turn on some Mardi Gras music here, sit down at a table in the air conditioning, talk, and, you know, it’s very easy, fun, approachable work. And we always like to, you know, just hear ideas from people, exchange anecdotes about their parading experience or what they grew up with as a kid, what their throw ideas are. So, it, you know, it, the throw assembly not only helps us reduce costs, but it’s also a great community outreach tool. And when we go to these schools, you know, we’ll go to like my alma mater, Metairie, and when we go during their assembly period one day, we get the entire high school for 30 minutes to take a package of stuff to assemble back in their home, room. And they do it, you know, it’s like a sprint. And they’ll do 6,000 throws, 7,000 throws in 30 minutes. So, really cool. And, you know, these are the future leaders of, of the parades. And they really get it. So, that’s inspiring to work with them. Well, my son doesn’t know it yet, but I just planned his next birthday party. So, we’ll be in touch. Okay. Sounds great. But it’s great y’all are getting into the high schools and getting people when they’re young. So, I mean, you change the mindset now, and that next generation are going to do things differently. Yeah, no, they totally get it. I mean, I, I grew up in New Orleans. I was lucky enough to spend my weekends hunting and fishing all around the state. I was lucky enough after college to go travel abroad and, you know, those things really made me an environmentalist, maybe a little bit ahead of the schedule. But I feel like so many of our young people now are tuned in to the issues that, you know, face the entire planet. And they can feel very overwhelming when you’re talking about stuff that’s at a global scale. But I think what everyone needs to remember is that it all starts with looking, you know, three blocks away from your home and engaging with an issue at that level. And taking that to its full extent. Which is something I’ve tried to do. And I think I see, you know, a lot of promise coming from our young people. One of my other questions is, do you, do, do you know if any of the crews have any incentives for them to either participate on like a volunteer level, or do you know if the city is looking to the crews to try to mitigate some of that financial impact on the back end? Those were two things that you mentioned that I was just really interested in because I know so many of New Orleans locals participate in these events. I’m still trying to get a spot in Iris, so shout out to them too. But really, what is it, what is there to, are they promoting that I know that they just have such wonderful city and act, involvement and whatnot. Is this something that you anticipate seeing them do a little bit more in the future? I hope so. Yeah. So, actually with the Krewe of Iris this year, we had an event, in partnership with Saint Michael Special School, which is another great organization for folks with intellectual disabilities. Where we used their gymnasium, right there on Lower Tchefuncte, as in that area. And we got, a couple of hundred Iris riders and Saint Michael’s students with their families, out in the gym and we put together Iris, Jambalaya and Red Beans throws. And we, for every throw that we made during that event, groundscrew gave, a donation to Saint Michael Special School. So, it was a fundraiser for Saint Michael’s. It was a way to get a lot of stuff done for us that was going to the Krewe of Iris. And it engaged a lot of Iris riders. We would love to replicate that on a much bigger scale, year to year to year with more crews. Because a lot of them do have community outreach sort of components to their organization. A lot of them are based around education, or, you know, I think Iris has a thing where they do a diaper drive for, you know, families that need help getting all of those, but we would love to see, instead of the community outreach being in directions that maybe don’t have to do with benefiting their own parade, what if they could do some of that work that then comes back in the form of sustainable environmentally sensitive throws. That would be really cool. So, we would love to, yeah, actually get more parades involved in that level. There’s no real requirement on the city level for anything like that. You know, the people that make all the rules around Mardi Gras, the mayor’s advisory council on Mardi Gras is all the Krewe captains. They, they treat all the policy related to Mardi Gras as a business only. There really needs to be a sustainability or resilience voice on that committee, someone who’s saying, okay, guys, you know, we understand the issue, we understand the funding and economic challenges of moving away from these high volume disposable throws, but it needs to be done, because we need to improve Mardi Gras. We can’t have visitors coming to our city who are totally shocked and awed and saying, whoa, what was that? I don’t know if I’ll ever return. We need to transition away from that. So, it’s, it’s gonna take a while, but, we believe it’s going to happen and we want to do that through, you know, really positive conversation. We don’t want to be out there, shaming crews on Instagram, you know, naming them, taking pictures of the trash and posting it all the time. We just want to, you know, really again, lead by positive example. So, that’s our philosophy and it will take a long time. We’ll get there. Well, and that was my next question. Thank you. I think y’all have just done such an incredible job, number one, honing in on what is a very obvious problem, but I don’t think God’s the recognition that it deserved as a problem. But doing it in a way that really highlights the cultural creativity of New Orleans and, and builds off of Mardi Gras. So, I really just have to commend y’all for that. But if you could just tell our listeners, what would, what would y’all’s goal be? What, what is Ground Screw goal look like for what Mardi Gras can, can be? What potential we have? Well, you know, my passion really now is in building this local sustainable throw economy. Our vision five years, 10 years from now is to have a facility in New Orleans, where we have people coming in huge groups, year round to help make these throws, the parading organizations coming to us, you know, corporate groups coming to us, high school kids coming to us, people looking for really, you know, easy entry, wage earning jobs, come to Ground Screw for a couple of hours, make throws. We’ll, you know, we’ll count them, weigh them, or whatever, give you some money to help do that work. We want that to be a year round. So, that’s a venue space, a storage space, where we are literally making sustainable throws, all year. And then finding a way to get those into the, the riders’ hands so that they can, you know, say, oh, I actually made this throw. And I did it with my little float organization. We had a great time. We went over, you know, eight Jambalaya, listen to music. That, that’s one of our big goals. We’re also working on the biodegradable compostable bead, you know, why are we making beads out of plastic junk, from factories overseas? The answer is because it’s cheap. But you can make a bead out of a lot of different waste products. And there’s some that are here in Louisiana that we wouldn’t have to go source this stuff from abroad for. There’s some agricultural products here that you can make into paper, you can make them into, to go containers. There’s no reason you can’t make those into a bead. But then you got to figure out how to give it value beyond just the fact that you’ve got a biodegradable bead. So, there’s a few bucket list things that we’re working on. And again, it’ll take some time, but, we, as we get more support, community outreach, sponsors, grants, philanthropy, donations, we can really make those things happen. Well, I definitely believe this is something that’s going to start taking off. You’ve been at it a couple of years. You know, y’all had the, the COVID pandemic kind of during y’all’s startup. So, but it’s, it’s a great idea. It’s something that’s needed. You know, it’s putting the green back in the purple, green and gold, so to speak. And, you know, if we’re gonna keep doing this stuff, it’s something we have to as a, a city, address. So, Well, thank you very much for being on. Other than Iris, is there any other places we can get y’all throws this year? We can be looking for them. Yeah, they’ll be in every parade. Again, we have, people from King Arthur, Cleopatra, and almost every single grade buys through our online catalog. So, if you’re out on the parade route and you hold up a sign that says, throw me some, throw me Jambalaya, throw me a Ground Screw throw. Most likely there’s going to be several people in that parade that are going to have something to throw at you. But if you really want to get showered with them, go out to the Iris parade, they’ve got about 81,000 of our throws, just in their Krewe package, this year. So, they’ll be a lot at that parade. Well, I will definitely be looking forward to it this year, and especially the Jambalaya packs, because I love Jambalaya. It’s my favorite food. Oh, yeah. This is good stuff too. Alright, Brett, well, thank you so much for joining us today. Another great episode. We really appreciate it. Everybody, if y’all can check out Brett online, on his domains and his hashtags that he gave us earlier. And by all means, if you have time or can volunteer, volunteer. Let’s do this right. Let’s make Mardi Gras better. Let’s get to where we need to be. Thank you all for watching. Appreciate it. Y’all take care. Thanks so much, Brett. Have a great Mardi Gras. Thank you. Scott Vicknair, injury attorneys. We fight for the win. 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