At the Great Minnesota-Get-Together sanitation workers spearhead trash awareness, composting
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
The beloved Minnesota State Fair, let’s face it, creates a lot of trash during its 12-day run.
The roughly 260 people that make up the fair’s sanitation department are at work 24 hours a day during the fair. Their mission? Make sure the Falcon Heights fairgrounds are as clean and sustainable as a state fair can be.
On a recent day at the fair — hot, muggy, with relentless sunshine — a group of four Como Park Senior High School students, members of the Marine Corps JROTC, are on the prowl for trash. The crew, all sporting fluorescent yellow vests, head toward the Cattle Barn.
Lily Jastram, a freshman, pushes a large dumpster. It has a small red pouch attached to the handle and inside, it’s filled with rolls of black trash bags.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
“I push it. Once they get to a trash can, they’ll take out the bag and put it in my cart. And then once we get to a dumpster at the, like, end of our route, we just take all the trash bags out and put them in the dumpster,” the 14-year-old said.
She’s standing near the Cattle Barn, and the scent of the horses and manure wafts through the air. I ask her what’s going through her mind.
“Mostly, I’m thinking that it’s hot, and secondly, I'm thinking that it stinks because we’re by all the poo, and all the bags are like dripping milk for some reason,” Jastram said.
“It’s so gross, but I’m also like thinking about how I’m gonna push the cart through all these people. But it really doesn't end up being that hard unless you’re like trying to get through a line, or someone stops in front of you.”
Cory Franzmeier, operations manager in charge of sanitation, said the JROTC members have learned through their program to work on something bigger than themselves.
“They’re able to come in and just kind of fit right in … the fair is bigger than you know any one individual so having that mentality to come in and just do that work knowing that like you're not going to be praised and thanked all the time,” he said.
In addition to these volunteers from a fundraising group, the sanitation department also partners with contractors and state fair employees who aid in the cleanup, Franzmeier said. During the day, about 160 people such as staff, contractors and fundraising volunteers maintain the grounds.
About 100 people are part of the overnight cleanup crew. Some 50 fair staffers and 50 contractors make sure all is clean by 7 a.m. when the fairgrounds open up again.
The sanitation department is responsible for 900 bins located on the fairgrounds. Some are outside of the fair, such as at the park-and-ride lots, which have about 100. The department also places barrels in nearby neighborhoods so “we’re not a nuisance to them either,” Franzmeier said.
“There’s hundreds of people out here just doing the best they can to maintain the space throughout the day,” he said.
Two of those helpful people are the Larson sisters: Kat, 28, and Izzy, 26.
A Roseville High School hockey coach of theirs suggested that they volunteer at the State Fair one summer. He connected them to the sanitation department.
For the first couple of years, the siblings said they worked multiple groundskeeping jobs, mainly cutting grass.
Kat Larson said that almost like every day each sibling had a different job.
“So it’s like when people ask, like, ‘Oh, what do you do there? It’s like, I don’t know. What did I do yesterday? It might be different than I'm doing tomorrow.’ And it's like all these different fun jobs.”
The Larsons said they bought an RV vehicle about five years ago. They spend most of the year traveling the country and perform work exchanges at farms in the south.
They said they return to Minnesota every year and are employed by the fair from late July through October.
“We really just needed a summer job in the beginning, and then it turned into the fair, obviously every year, and it was a job that we fell in love with in the sanitation department,” Kat Larson said. “Now we’re part of the compost sustainability kind of side to it.”
As is their wont, Izzy and Kat revel in dumpster diving. They try to save furniture and stuffed animals when possible while diving through dumpsters. But their main work for the fair is collecting compost from 10 to 15 fair vendors throughout the day.
The sisters said they've seen plenty of corn husks piled up in the compost bin near the Corn Stand.
Franzmeier has given them free reign and creativity space to come up with other ways to recycle, reuse and distribute waste. Izzy Larson said being in the sustainability space has transformed them.
“You look inside a dumpster and there’s things in there that people can use,” Izzy said. “It’s just about getting it to them or having a thought before just throwing it in the landfill dumpster of like, could this be used elsewhere?”
The Larsons this summer created a respite area called “Trash Island,” located under trees behind the sanitation building. Izzy Larson says their top priority is increasing knowledge about trash.
“Our biggest thing is just trying to create a little more awareness for the people and anybody, you know, just to have an extra thought before throwing it in to a dumpster. Like, one, where is this dumpster going?” she said.
The Larson sisters hope one day to create an educative interactive space at the sanitation building where attendees can walk through to see where waste goes.
