Riviera Village Summer Festival Not So Green

I walked down from my Hollywood Riviera home to the Riviera Village Summer Festival Saturday on a mission to get something good to eat while I listened to the groovin' music on this perfect June beach day for the first weekend of summer. I also wanted to see how my own hometown street fair stacks up against neighboring events in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Palos Verdes.

I'm happy to report that there was a great BBQ truck that served up a smoking good pulled pork sandwich and a big BBQ'd turkey leg.

But I'm sorry to have to tell you that the Riviera Village Summer Festival (RVSF) ranks dead last in standard green practices for public events. The organizers weren't engaging in any visible sustainability or environmental practices.

Let's start with the easiest and most widespread standard for trash containers at outdoor events — providing receptacles for recyclable cans, bottles, plastic and paper, and separate bins for food waste and garbage. But at the RVSF they had only cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags into which waste of all kinds went. 

Even if you hire people to sift through the mixed trash to fish out the recyclables later, you're still setting a terrible public example for festival visitors and you're sending the loud, clear signal to every kid and other citizen that Riviera Village doesn't give a hoot about recycling or the waste it generates.

Another waste-related issue was the use of Styrofoam containers, plastic bags and single-use plastic bottles and utensils by the vendors. Our landfills and oceans are choking in plastic, and in 2010 it's well past time for those legacy materials to be banned from the RVSF. They are prohibited at the Fiesta Hermosa and at Manhattan Beach and Palos Verdes festivals.

It's also time to switch from diesel power generators to biodiesel or solar generators. Our friends in Hermosa Beach and PV have made that transition and use recycled cooking oil from the local restaurants. If they can do it, Riviera Village can too.

The RVSF is the perfect street fair to ride your bike to, and I saw bicycles all throughout the festival grounds. That's a good thing, and the festival should encourage as many people to come by bike as possible. It solves the big parking problem and helps cut the carbon footprint and pollution levels for every car that a bike replaces. 

But as you can see by my photos, there were bikes locked to objects all throughout the RVSF and people walking their bikes everywhere.  The great way to solve that problem and get lots more people bicycling to the festival is to provide a bike valet service like they did at Fiesta Hermosa over Memorial Day weekend. I was a volunteer at that event and we parked and secured more than 2,000 bicycles during the holiday weekend. I noted that there was plenty of space in the Village to hold a bike valet, and I'm sure we could get the volunteers to help staff it.

Last but not least, events like the RVSF are ideal opportunities to provide the community with news and information about environmental issues from our local environmental nonprofit groups such as the South Bay Environmental Services Center, the South Bay 350 Climate Action Group, Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay, Greenpeace and also for the city of Redondo Beach to tout its green initiatives.

Alas, I saw nothing of the sort at the RVSF.

The county of Los Angeles is launching an exciting energy program that will provide Redondo Beach homeowners with rebates, tax credits and loan money for energy efficiency retrofits that will then save them thousands of dollars in reduced energy costs. I sure wish the RVSF used the chance it had to bring that news to all the locals who came to the fair.

But there's always the next time, and I'm hopeful that then the RVSF organizers will put a higher priority on green, sustainable practices and educating the community.