On February 22, the first Saturday of the city’s official Carnival season, the Krewe of Freret became the first Carnival parade to ban toxic plastic beads. Instead, krewe members threw strings of glass beads, reviving a traditional throw that had largely disappeared after being a staple of Carnival dating back to the 1930s.
Starting in the 1960s, cheaper plastic beads became ubiquitous. But the colorful strings of plastic are most often made in China from melted-down e-waste, which contains toxic chemicals.
Few people knew the toxins that came with Carnival’s plastic addiction until a two-person team at a nonprofit called Grounds Krewe helped bring attention to the matter.
Over the past several years, Grounds Krewe has helped to lead parade-route recycling efforts and provided hundreds of thousands of sustainable throws to float riders. Another local non-profit, Glass Half Full, worked with the city to collect bottles from city barrooms to melt back into sand, and both organizations have promoted awareness about the dangers of plastic production, especially in a petrochemical hotbed like Louisiana.
Though Freret instituted a total plastic-bead ban, an increasing number of other krewes – including old-line krewes like Hermes and Rex – are now also coming to Grounds Krewe for sustainable throws, said founder Brett Davis, who has seen an exponential rise in interest in “green” throws. “Things are 100% on the up and up,” he said.
In 2018, Davis, a New Orleans native, established a single recycling station at the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles Avenues and founded Grounds Krewe, to promote waste prevention, recycling and sustainable throws. The recycling project limped along for a few years with minimal resources. He was about to give up on it. But in 2022, his efforts were reinvigorated, when the New Orleans Office of Resilience & Sustainability launched its Recycle Dat! initiative in partnership with Grounds Krewe and the city’s tourism organization, New Orleans & Company, with support from national sponsors like Every Can Counts, Entergy and Coca-Cola.
This year, the Recycle Dat! initiative has grown to include eight stations along the Uptown parade route. A parking lot at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana Avenues has also become the epicenter of this year’s initiative, an open-air facility called “Recycle World,” where parade-route revelers can view artwork created from recycled cans and watch the sorting process, led by the non-profit Osprey Initiative.
To make that happen, Grounds Krewe has been leading operations and meeting with the city, New Orleans & Company, and Glass Half Full twice a month since May, said Anna Nguyen, external affairs manager for the Office of Resilience & Sustainability.
For the first time, the city has incentivized this year’s parade-goers to bring recyclable trash from home to parades, to participate in a recycling rewards program. Participants can earn an entry into a sweepstakes for local prizes – hotel rooms, concert tickets, and gift cards – by bringing either one full bag of clean, unbroken throws, 12 empty aluminum cans, or 12 empty plastic bottles to one of the recycling stations located along the St. Charles route.
Along other parade routes, sub-krewes are also focused on the issue. And local watering holes have also joined in.
In 2019, the “Re-Cyclists” first made recycling an interactive part of Krewe Bohème, which follows a route through Faubourg Marigny and the French Quarter. Members of the group, formerly known as the Trashformers, ride cart/bike hybrids while dressed in elaborate, eco-pun costumes such as “Marie Can-toinette,” “Oscar the Recycling Grouch” and “The Pacific Garbage Patch Kid.” During one evening parade – February 14, as Bohème rolled – the Re-Cyclist sub-krewe diverted 162 pounds of aluminum, six pounds of plastic and 10 pounds of glass.
February 1st marked the start of Recycle Dat!’s new Bar Wars program, which collects glass bottles from local bars, to be picked up by Glass Half Full, a non-profit that turns glass waste into sustainable sand used in local coastal restoration projects. From February 1 to February 25, the program diverted 22,000 pounds of glass from 23 bars.
In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a nearly $4 million grant for New Orleans to improve the city’s recycling infrastructure. Nguyen hopes that the momentum for recycling will last beyond Carnival, as the city expands its current residential recycling program and develops a 10-year solid-waste master plan.
Plastic dependency and Louisiana’s fenceline communities
As Carnival revelers gain greater awareness of the toxicity of plastic Carnival beads, environmental activists are working to shine a light on the impacts of plastic production here in Louisiana.
For singer and New Orleans native Dawn Richard, Carnival season is a time for people to celebrate each other instead of focusing on material throws. To spread her messages, she has worked closely with the Hip Hop Caucus, a non-profit and non-partisan organization that leverages Hip Hop culture to encourage young people to participate in the democratic process.
Richard thinks back to her childhood days. “What I remember as a native… it was less about the beads and more about getting to hang with your entire family outside and celebrate the beauty of our city,” she said.
To commemorate the loss her family experienced 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina, she has spent the year sewing a Black Masking Indian suit that she will wear as she walks with her family and the Washitaw Nation tribe on Mardi Gras Day. It is also the 20th anniversary of the Hip Hop Caucus, which was formed out of grassroots efforts that helped Richard and other families who lost everything.
On Saturday, Richard rode in the Krewe of Freret and threw sustainable throws customized for local producer and performance artist Boyfriend, who was nominated last year to act as the krewe’s first sustainability adviser.
While Richard said she is happy to see recycling gain steam during Carnival, she hopes the conversation can shift toward the larger issue of how plastic production harms the majority-Black communities that line the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
In St. James Parish, members of Inclusive Louisiana, Rise St. James and Mount Triumph Baptist Church still hope to expose racist land-use practices that have steered hazardous industry into the 4th and 5th Districts, while explicitly protecting plantations and majority-white Catholic churches.
For years, Rise St. James has fought plans from Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese conglomerate, to build the Sunshine Project, a giant petrochemical plant in Welcome, a historically Black community in the parish’s 5th district.
“We have to stop making the plastics to begin with,” Richard said.
The $9.4 billion Sunshine Project would be hazardous to human health because plastic is made from crude oil, natural gas or coal, which is refined into lighter components and treated with gasoline to create chains of molecules called polymers.
The extraction of fossil fuels and their transformation into plastics has been shown to create hazardous air pollutants that can cause reproductive complications such as premature birth and low birthweights, as well as illnesses such as cancer and asthma.
Recycling can help, but the real solution is getting rid of the petrochemical plants, Richard said. “We recycle but if we’re building tons of plants around our neighborhoods it’s for naught,” she added.
The most coveted sustainable throws
Until recently, reusable throws were almost unheard of, within a sea of plastic swords, cups, frisbees and beads. But now, in the homes of New Orleans locals, many everyday items such as tea towels, makeup compacts and drawstring bags are branded with a specific krewe’s name and annual theme.
Coming into this year, several longtime krewes – Iris, Themis, ALLA, Okeanos and Pygmalion – were established Grounds Krewe customers. For the boxes destined for specific krewes, Davis’ team creates custom stickers. Each box, whether generic or krewe-specific, also is tagged with a QR code that links to more information about who made the product and why it is considered sustainable.
Grounds Krewe made 130,000 throws for krewe orders this year alone, Davis said. Selling directly to krewes is influential because the social clubs make money to sustain their activities by buying in bulk and selling the merchandise to float riders, he added.
More than 80% of the products sold by Grounds Krewe are made in Louisiana. Many more are made elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. Here are the top five sustainable throws:
- Every year, Ground Krewe’s most popular throw is a jambalaya mix made by Jambalaya Girl, a small business based in New Orleans. “It’s kind of a perfect throw,” said Davis. “It’s relatively affordable. It’s unique as a food item, so tourists are fascinated by it. It’s got a great shelf life and it’s delicious.”
- The second most popular throw is a soap bar made by Avanni Soaps, a one-woman business based in Port Allen, La. This year, artisan Princess Newbold also made shampoo bars for Grounds Krewe out of her garage. “She was selling a few bars at a time on Etsy when I first found her,” said Davis. “Now she’s got a guaranteed order of at least 15,000 bars per year.”
- Coming in third is a lemon-sugar hand scrub made by K&G Bath & Body Plus, a local business run by two women in Raceland, La. The scrubs are already a favorite toiletry option for crawfish boils, to remove the pepper and oils that can get in eyes or irritate delicate skin.
- Number four on the list is a biodegradable glitter kit made by Glitter Nymph, a small business in New Orleans. The bio-glitter is made from the fibers of highly renewable Eucalyptus trees instead of the microplastics lurking in traditional glitter kits.
- For the gardeners comes the fifth-most popular throw, the Louisiana Native Flower Starter Kit, which is created with seeds produced and collected locally by the Native Plant Initiative of Greater New Orleans.
Davis said his work purchasing bulk orders from small businesses supports what’s become a “local, sustainable-throw economy.” Roughly 2,400 volunteers work to condense the products into small, throw-sized packaging. To keep costs down for riders, Grounds Krewe leverages its status as a non-profit to solicit grants that help cover overhead.
Years ago, Davis identified the Krewe of Iris as an ideal partner. Founded in 1917, Iris is the oldest and now largest all-female Krewe in New Orleans. This year, Grounds Krewe struck an additional partnership with Rex, one of the oldest participating Mardi Gras krewes, dating back to 1872. More than a century ago, Rex became the first krewe to toss throws to crowds from every float in their parade, according to Carnival historians.
Leaders of the iconic Rex krewe, known for parading down St. Charles Avenue on Mardi Gras Day carrying King Rex, the proclaimed “King of Carnival,” gave Grounds Krewe a moment of fame during an NBC Carnival broadcast.
“Rex is the original krewe to toss a parade throw,” said Davis. “When you have the captain of the krewe in the float den talking to the Today Show about sustainability and how this is the future of throws, that’s a really big moment for us.”