New Haven Independent

The upcoming 14th Arts & Ideas Festival, running June 14 to 27, will not only stage its iconic events on the Green as usual. This year the whole festival will be truly green, as in more environmentally sensitive.

This bottle, made of artistic materials scheduled to biodegrade in 2014, will take a big bow. Although 80 percent of the events in the festival are free to the public, the major events require some admission; the bottle is no different.

Not to be upstaged by the people holding it (in photo, A&I chief Mary Lou Aleskie and state tourism chief Randy Fiveash), the bottle indicated it was requesting a suggested donation of $20.

That money will support the festival’s free programming this summer. You’ll be able to see the bottle in action and to purchase it both at the festival’s info booth near the main stage on the Green and at the English Market at 839 Chapel.

Take another bow, bottle!

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, Aleskie announced, in addition to the new policy discouraging disposable water bottle usage, two more environmentally wise measures: more recycling at the festival, and partnerships with the three railroads serving the Elm City designed to encourage festival-goers to leave their cars at home.

“For the first time,” she said, “Shore Line East, Amtrak, and Metro-North are all partners in making the festival far more accessible, without a car.”

Shore Line East trains will allow up to four kids ages 11 and under to travel free with one paying adult during the festival. The service will be every two hours, according to Mary Reid, Shore Line’s marketing coordinator (pictured on the left with Rideworks’ Jean Taylor Stimolo).

“This is the first festival,” said Reid, “for which Shore Line weekend service is going to be available.” That weekend service, which now carries some 500 to 700 riders to and from New Haven on a typical weekend day began last year, but after the festival.

“We also worked with the festival performances to coordinate with them some aspects of our schedule,” Reid added.

“Final events,” added Stimolo, “will end, for example, so people can catch the last train leaving New Haven, at State Street, at 10:07. You can bring the whole family for cheap, and you don’t need a car.”

Metro-North and Amtrak are also offering discounted round-trip tickets that include admission to festival events.

That the festival is forgoing plastic water bottles and encouraging purchase and use of its logo-ed bottle might have something to do with a board director, Gordon Geballe. He wears another hat as a dean at Yale’s School of Forestry.

The bottles, he said, will be good to drink from many times, and then will biodegrade five years from now.

After the accolades for the bottle died down, perhaps the most cheers at the jaunty press conference came when Christy Hass, the city’s deputy director for parks and squares, introduced the Queen of the Green, aka Sarah Stevenson.

“Finally,” announced Hass, “the city is going to recycle at these events. We have found the way! Sarah and some six others will be going around getting people’s attention and asking them to deposit their recyclables in bins that they are wheeling.”

Piloted at the last St. Patrick’s Day Festival, the bottle-and-can collecting cadre of parks department volunteers realized that the human touch is needed to get people to pay attention.

“We discovered people want to recycle and will recycle but primarily when they are asked,” said Hass. She said she received this insight when she visited Disney World and saw the Mickey and Donald characters actually approaching people. “If you just have bins with signs, that won’t work. Sarah, believe me, will get peoples’ attention.”

The plan, explained Hass, is to have two parks department trucks nearby to receive the bottles and cans collected, there to be dumped periodically during festival events.

“Late in each day,” Hass added, “people from Columbus House or some such non-profit, which we haven’t decided on yet, will sift through the recyclables taking the ones they can redeem. The balance we’ll recycle.”

Each ton of recyclables mixed with garbage costs the city $80, she elaborated. “When we pay for just the recyclables, it’s $30, so on each batch the city saves $50.”

But those nifty new biodegradable bottles starring in the festival of 2009 need not be in the bins … until the festival of 2019.