Mardi Gras beads are eco-hangover

NEW ORLEANS – The beads were flying all around them, some pooling in the street, some caught by revelers and cherished for a moment – most of them destined, in all likelihood, for the landfill.

It was Mardi Gras 2011, and Kirk and Holly Groh were stationed in their family’s traditional viewing spot downtown, where they had watched so many parades roll by in years past.

This time, they kept thinking what a waste it was.

Their hometown had never seemed more environmentally fragile. Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters had claimed their house in August 2005. Five years later, they watched their local fishmongers worry their way through the BP oil spill.

But then the undersea gusher was finally capped, and a few months later New Orleans was once again inundated with millions of pounds of Chinese-made, petroleum-based plastic beads – the iconic spoils of Mardi Gras.

“Nothing had changed,” Holly Groh said. “We were astonished, and just kind of dumbfounded.”

The Grohs have since flung themselves into one of the nation’s more esoteric – and, some would argue, futile – environmental crusades: bringing a little conservationist restraint to the city’s pre-Lenten orgy of excess, which this year falls on Feb. 21.

The movement, for now, is modest, and its concerns are myriad, but most of the effort has focused on the estimated 25 million pounds of plastic beads that make their way to the city every year.

The beads, of course, are central to the ritualized gift exchanges unique to Mardi Gras season, a multiday series of parties and parades that brings an estimated million revelers to the streets for what is sometimes called “the Greatest Free Show on Earth.” Members of Mardi Gras “krewes,” the private social organizations that stage the parades, spend thousands to purchase the shiny baubles by the gross, then fling them to crowds who beg for them with the exclamation, “Throw me something, mister!”

In the touristy French Quarter, boozy packs of men stagger with beads stockpiled on their necks, infamously offering to bestow their gaudier strands on women who agree to flash their bare breasts.

But after the exchange is made, the beads’ value plummets. The parade-goers are left, in the end, with strands of junk.

Traditional recycling centers cannot process the beads. However, a few nonprofits in recent years have refined programs that collect, bundle and resell them. And this year, an unprecedented crop of initiatives has sprung up to help feed the recycled bead market, with most of the ideas as idiosyncratic as the city itself.

The Arc of Greater New Orleans, a nonprofit that employs its mentally challenged clients in a bead-recycling program, introduced a trailer this season that will bring up the rear at some parades, encouraging revelers to throw back the trinkets they just caught with a slogan well-known to south Louisiana fishermen: “Catch and release.”

In October, a local environmental group called LifeCity held a contest it dubbed “Green the Gras.” The winning entrant proposed (but has not yet implemented) a system that would encourage the exchange of beads for tokens from businesses. The tokens could be used for a luxury most coveted on Mardi Gras day: the use of a clean bathroom.

On Feb. 11, the group the Grohs founded, Verdi Gras, tested a recycling pilot program with the blessing of city government, setting out bead collection bins along the route for the Krewe of Pontchartrain.

Like-minded revelers, about 130 of whom attended a Verdi Gras ball in January, imagine a future Carnival where more “throws” might be locally produced, handmade objets d’art.

For these new activists, the deluge of beads is emblematic of regional attitudes about the environment that they wish to change. National green groups, which descended on Louisiana during the BP oil spill, often received a lukewarm reception from residents worried about the effect of stricter regulation on oil-industry jobs. Before Katrina, New Orleans officials had discussed killing off the city’s curbside recycling program because of low participation rates.

“It’s a cultural thing,” said Ryan Berni, a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu. “We have a hard enough time convincing people to put their trash in the can.”