How Food & Wine Classic’s leftovers, waste, serviceware are taken care of

Food & Wine Classic is a constant in Aspen every summer, drawing in visitors and hungry patrons from around the world. But what about all the leftovers?

The Food & Wine Green Team, which started off taking empty wine bottles to the recycling center in the back of old pickups 35 years ago, has expanded their operations and focused on reducing as much waste from the event as possible. Last year, only 19% of the 22.37 tons of waste produced ended up in the landfill. The rest was either recycled or composted. This year, however, the team has made an even larger shift towards composting over recycling because of Aspen’s stringent laws on what plastics can be recycled.

“We made all exhibitors provide all compostable service items, before we used to also allow recyclable service items,” Shawna Rockey, the catering manager for the Grand Tasting. “Aspen has specific rules on what’s considered recyclable. So in order to get any gray area, all of our food exhibitors within the tents this year are serving on 100% commercial-grade compostable serviceware.”

With the massive amounts of compost and other recyclable waste this year, Food & Wine has set up a 31-ft. compost dumpster as well as two dumpsters for cardboard and plastic wrap. All of the leftovers people don’t eat or isn’t served, waste from prepping the food, and servicewear are all recycled. The compost dumpster is emptied every day, and each day, it collects over one ton of compostable waste. Over the course of the event last year, almost five tons of waste was composted. With the new  compostable serviceware, the number is likely to be higher this year.

Besides the food waste that is being composted, some is shipped back to the distributors. Typically, that would be expensive, or exotic foods that weren’t used that the distributors can use again later. Much of the food, however, can be redistributed to the local community. In fact, both food waste that is composted and food that is donated all serve the community. 

“It’s (the compost) organic, it’s federally-certified; we want to make sure that we’re giving the landfill a really good product, so when it ends up as mountain greenery or at some of the local ranches or with the City of Aspen Parks Department, we want to make sure that they’re not getting glass shards in there,” Jeremy Frees, who leads the Green Team said.

All compost that is processed by the Pitkin County Landfill stays within the Roaring Fork Valley. The landfill sells the compost to the public for use as fertilizer and soil. It is also constantly turning over, meaning it isn’t as permanent as trash that is buried. 

“The landfill has a short lifespan ahead of it,” Frees said. “Whatever we can do to draw that out more and expand that is definitely going to help protect our local environment.”

At all of the tri-stations — or trash receptacles with bags for compost, recycle, and trash — volunteers direct guests on where to deposit what waste. In case anything slips through, more volunteers inspect each bag to make sure it is all correctly sorted before it goes into the dumpsters. 

The donation side is equally as helpful to the community. Food & Wine has partnered with Harvest for Hunger, based in Snowmass Village, to redistribute usable food to local businesses and organizations. Some food is donated to organizations like LIFT-UP, but some of the more perishable food goes to places like local schools or the fire department. Last year, Food & Wine had a lot of leftover Noosa ice cream.

“The firestation was super stoked to receive half a pallet of Noosa ice cream,” Rockey said.