Green Team Makes Recycling A Success During Seafood and Wine

The Newport Seafood & Wine Festival, put on annually for 49 years by the Greater

Newport Chamber of Commerce during the third weekend in February, generates tourists to town during a normally quiet time of year. Along with generating visitors and associated revenue, the festival also generates a large amount of waste. This is where the Seafood & Wine Festival Green Team comes in.

When the festival returned after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2023, Aimee Thompson from Thompson’s Sanitary Service worked with then festival coordinator Bobbi Price, now Yachats City Manager, to rethink the cleanup duties. After seeing other festivals sort waste and reduce their waste footprint, they enlisted the Rotary Club of Newport, of which Thompson is a member, to once again take over cleanup duties but with a different twist –

create a Green Team who sorts out ALL recyclable and compostable materials with the help of volunteers at waste stations throughout the tents.

“The first year we learned a lot and was especially difficult because it snowed and the festival had to delay its opening by a day” said Aimee Thompson, “but we took notes, made

improvements and have tackled it every year since with incremental success and efficiency year over year.” Since then, festival coordinator Maggie Conrad has supported the Green Team the last three years by sending out approved compostable serviceware packets to all vendors well in advance in hopes they purchase those products to serve up their delicacies. Not all vendors adhere to this ask but it has created a general awareness that Newport cares about this issue and more vendors each year have adopted these products.

This year’s efforts resulted in 72% of the waste being diverted (2% increase over last year) from the landfill comprised of the following being recycled or composted:

• 8,470 pounds of glass

• 3,300 pounds of Cardboard & Comingled recycling

• 1,140 pounds of Mixed Compostables (food waste including oyster and crab shells)

• 29 BottleDrop bags of beverage containers collected (approx. total of 145 pounds based on average weight) with redemption benefitting Samaritan House.

The BottleDrop beneficiary changes every year with previous organizations being the Newport Booster Club and Newport High School Grad night. ll in all, that is a total of 13,055 pounds recycled or composted during the four-day festival. To give context,

Lincoln County has 30.9% annual diversion rate for all waste collected. The last published data is from 2022, while the State of Oregon as of 2025 has a 55% diversion rate goal.

The Rotary Club of Newport receives payment for its Green Team duties to fulfill 65 volunteer slots during festival hours Thursday through Sunday, including general cleanup on Sunday. Since 65 slots is a big ask of one organization,

Rotary shares the online signup to organizations throughout the community offering a $50

donation to every volunteer shift filled by their organization. With the majority of Green Team volunteers on behalf of Rotary, this year it also included volunteers from Surfrider Newport Chapter, Samaritan House, Logsden Community Center, Coastbusters, Salvation Army of Lincoln County, Central Coast Humane Society, Newport High School Wrestling, Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, the Hatfield Student Organization, Siletz Valley Fire Volunteers, and Newport High School Grad Night.

Every year Thompson’s Sanitary Service donates employee time and services to assist with the waste collection including TSS Route Manager Victor Purpuree supervising the Green Team along with ten employees who volunteered their own time towards the organization of their choice.