Interview with Director of Engineering At Turner Field About Trash After Baseball Games
RHONDA SCHAFFLER, CNN ANCHOR: Well, ballparks and arenas across the U.S. spend millions of dollars to clean up all that trash people leave behind. But, instead of hauling it off to landfills, many facilities have chosen to recycle. Joining me now is Eric Parestuk, director of engineering for Turner Field, home of the Braves, right here in Atlanta, of course. Eric, it's good to have you.</s>ERIC PERESTUK, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING TURNER FIELD: Good to be here.</s>SCHAFFLER: Boy, I'm trying to imagine what the weirdest piece of trash was that's ever been tossed.</s>PERESTUK: Oh, I couldn't even imagine. We find just about everything. You talk about animal carcasses, we've found them. From everything from -- you know, your beer cans, and your coke, and food, and everything else, and of course, Turner Field being a multi-use facility, we have it all. I mean people just think it's paper, and it's not.</s>SCHAFFLER: And you have too much, right? So, you've got to get rid of it.</s>PERESTUK: 3,000 tons a year.</s>SCHAFFLER: 3,000 tons.</s>PERESTUK: Of total trash.</s>SCHAFFLER: So where's it going?</s>PERESTUK: Well, pretty much what we tried to do at Turner Field is reduce the amount of trash we send to landfills every year. Really my goal is, pretty much, one pound out of every three pounds, so about 1,000 tons a year, we try to recycle. That's really our goal, which is everything from cardboard to plastic to paper, the bottles and those types of things. But we also go one step further and try to take everything, even the grass clippings, oil, batteries, carts.</s>SCHAFFLER: That's pretty inclusive as far as a recycling program goes.</s>PERESTUK: Oh, it's huge. And you've got to give that to Turner -- our founder, Ted Turner, who started this here, all at CNN center. We just kind of collect everything and anything that we could find and we -- every year we try to come up with something a little bit different. This year Turner Field our really -- goal is to go to plastic, get rid of glass and -- which is a little difficult, as most beer and things are sold in cans, which is fine with aluminum, but we'd like to try to get rid of glass bottles, the designer beers, the imports and if we can get them, the manufacturers of the bottlers to start putting them in plastic, we'd do a little bit better.</s>SCHAFFLER: We should mention of course, Turner Field, Ted Turner, we're all one big happy family, here at CNN AOL Time Warner, we get all the plugs in there.</s>PERESTUK: Exactly.</s>SCHAFFLER: I want to ask you a little bit about the recycling issue itself. For you is it environmental or is it a cost factor?</s>PERESTUK: Well, you know, a lot of people say it's a way to make money or something, but on for us, we don't look at it that way. We do it -- obviously it's the right thing to do. But for us, it's just more of a -- kind of the right thing to do as to reduce the costs, yes it helps a little bit, but recycling itself, to set it up, at Turner Field I could tell you, just the program itself was about a half a million dollars to set that up. And that's a pretty long payback when you're coming with that, so it's more of a -- just the right thing to do, we like to consider it.</s>SCHAFFLER: You know, it's so funny, though, because the right thing to do is actually to put this stuff in a trash can before it gets to the floor and we know it's part of the experience, people throw peanuts all over the place, but don't we need some help educating people or perhaps -- you know, saying -- you know, it'd be easier if you guys would just throw this in the trash can?</s>PERESTUK: I can't even begin to tell you how difficult. We've actually taken it to the point where we try to recycle it from the vendor itself, we will pour it into a can and have the vendors actually place it, signage, it's such a challenge to get people to work with us because the contamination, I don't know if you know this, but if you do throw the wrong kind of glass in a bottle, it would contaminate the whole thing and would end up back at the landfill. We do different things and we will actually have people quality-control our trash, as we like to call it.</s>SCHAFFLER: I like that, Eric Perestuk, if I go to Turner Field, while I'm here; I'm not going to throw anything, anything on the ground. I can guarantee that.</s>PERESTUK: Well, we'd really appreciate that.</s>SCHAFFLER: Good talking to you. Thanks so much.</s>PERESTUK: Thank you very much. Good to be here. About Trash After Baseball Games>