I suppose it’s not exactly breaking news that 60,000 people can produce an awful lot of trash. Especially when they’re squeezed into appropriately named “pens” for several hours on Central Park’s Great Lawn.

Still, it’s pretty amazing to experience it for yourself. On Saturday, I joined NRDC’s “Green Team” to help collect recycling during Bon Jovi’s free concert on the Great Lawn. The show was a part of the festivities surrounding Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, which is being played Tuesday in Yankee Stadium.

Baseball teamed up with NRDC to make this All-Star Game more friendly to the environment. The league is doing things like powering Yankee Stadium with renewable wind energy and using clean-air hybrid buses to shuttle fans to various events. Find out more about baseball’s plans – including how an 18-block red carpet can be made “green.”

As part of the effort, about 60 volunteers from NRDC waded into Saturday’s massive crowd of Bon Jovi fans on the Great Lawn, armed only with giant recycling bags. Our job was to keep bottles and cans out of the trash bins and make sure they got recycled, instead of winding up in a landfill somewhere.

And as I mentioned at the top, 60,000 people waiting for hours in the hot sun can go through an awful lot of bottles and cans.

'Go Green Team!' 

Fortunately, people were perfectly willing – even eager – to help us out. The first time I squeezed through the metal fencing into one of the big pens and started yelling, “Anybody got bottles and cans for recycling? Empties, anyone,” I got some surprised looks. But quickly, people caught on, and pretty much everywhere I turned someone was holding up a plastic bottle. I’d thank them for recycling, and they’d thank me for doing this. A few even cheered, “Go Green Team!”

“People seem genuinely thankful,” said my wife, Jaime, who volunteered with me. “Almost everyone says thank you. It’s really nice.”

“I got some high fives,” one of the other volunteers told me. And NRDC’s Matt Cohen (right, with volunteer coordinator James Hands) actually had people cheering “Yay, Matt!” when he came through.

People also asked where we got our Green Team T-shirts – although that might have had something to do with the fact that wearing them allowed us to get through the security fences. “I hope someone doesn’t jump me for my shirt,” joked NRDC intern Chris Long.

Our bags were big enough to haul away a couple of 6-year-old kids, but you could fill them up with plastic bottles in less than 10 minutes while walking through the crowd. At one point, I found myself in the middle of a pen with a bulging bag, far from where we dumped them for pickup. Even though I was out of room, people were still eagerly holding out bottles for me to take. So I wound up pulling out a second bag and double fisting. I strode through the masses with two big sacks slung over my shoulder, like some sort of recycling Santa.

You had to be careful where you stepped, of course (I apologize to anyone that I might have tripped over), and at one point I had to dodge an errant Frisbee zooming straight at my head. The guy who threw it apologized heartily, though. “It’s a great thing you guys are doing,” he said.

Getting the message 

The bags we piled up will all be collected by New York-based Sims Metal Management, which, according to the company’s website, processes about 240,000 tons of plastic, glass and metal that New Yorkers toss into recycling bins each year. One of the company’s supervisors said the Green Team’s work on Saturday was part of what, in his experience, must be one of the largest public recycling efforts in New York City history.

One of the most encouraging signs, he said, was that not only were the bags that we were hauling around filled with bottles and cans, but the regular recycling bins placed throughout the park seemed to be filled with 90 to 95 percent recycling materials, too. He had seen very little trash in them – and very little recycling in the trash, which isn’t the case at most big events like this.

That’s a good sign, he said, that people were getting the message and making an effort to recycle themselves, even when we weren’t walking up to them with bags and making it easy.

I noticed this myself. Some of the people who gave me their bottles and cans had already divided them in separate plastic bags from their regular trash. So while it’s great that we were there to help, it’s even better that so many people were already thinking about recycling on their own.

Now it will be great if some of the concert-goers take Saturday’s experience and think about other easy ways that they can help the planet in their daily lives. Here are some ideas for getting started.

After four hours of filling up bags, my shift ended and Bon Jovi came on stage. I was so hoarse from yelling, “Anybody got recycling?” that I could barely scream along with, “Whooah, ooh, living on a prayer.” But somehow, I managed.

I don’t doubt that after the concert was over and everyone filed out, the Great Lawn still had a lot of trash on it. That’s when the professionals went to work. But imagine what it would have been like if we hadn’t been there to help, and if people hadn’t made an effort to recycle on their own.

A big waste, that’s what.
 

NRDC's Green Team in action at Saturday's Bon Jovi concert in Central Park. Photos by Matt Cohen.