The Illinois State Fair made national news this year when the press – everyone from MSNBC to the Boston Globe to the Kansas City Star – made note of the Fair’s first-ever Green Vendor Award. In other words, green is hot at the fair this year! What’s more, one of the contenders was the donut stand run by The Donut Family . . . not a product you would typically associate with environmentally friendly, perhaps.
The reason was because they were serving their mini-donuts on paper products instead of Styrofoam. As MSNBC pointed out, “At an institution where recycling became a possibility only a year ago, a vendor doing business without styrofoam is as green as it gets.”
We’ve noted other fairs going green, including the California State Fair’s use of cow manure to power a kiddie ride and the North Carolina State Fair offering a whole exhibit called Green NC. This exhibit will introduce fairgoers to easy and economical ways to help save the environment, as well as introduce future technologies.
And, according to the MSNBC report, fairs in California and Washington are installing solar panels to generate electricity and converting used cooking oil into biofuel. Others, like Missouri, are introducing recycling bins for the first time.
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