Fat Tuesday is the biggest day of the year for the Carnival Season and every year hundreds of thousands of people travel to the Big Easy to line the streets and catch beads thrown from the floats.
Michael Sampey has been coming to New Orleans to see the many floats for over 20 years. People looking to travel home light are not keeping all of their catches.
"It’s the fun of catching them, it’s the fun of being with friends and family catching them and kids love the flashy blinky ones," Sampey said. "After 26 years in the beginning, you bring them back up to Chicago and give them away and over the years you learn to recycle them."
The Public Engagement Director of New Orleans Homeland Security Emergency Preparedness, Anna Nguyen said the push to recycle beads and throws from the parades has been growing. She said the city is in it's second year recycling beads, setting up catch basins on the busiest parade route.
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"Before the city was involved it was a much more smaller operation it was from Napoleon down to Louisiana like 10 blocks. And now we are able to go over 50 city blocks," Nguyen said.
From February 3rd to February 4th, the city collected 1,462 pounds of Mardi Gras items. Nguyen said they are on track to recycle more than ever this year.
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"We actually deliver beads and throws that are unbroken and clean to organizations that provide jobs to people with intellectual disabilities," Nguyen said.
Lafourche Arc is one of those organizations that helps repackage and resell beads. The organization's Vocational Director Kyle Soignet said as soon as Mardi Gras ends they have already begun working on reselling the beads to krewes for next year.
"We will package them and we will go through and sort them by size 24 inch, 32 inch. All the work that goes into putting the beads together with the participants we support. The money made from the sales basically goes back to them," Soignet said.
Lafourche Arc uses trailers to collect beads along parade routes in Thibodaux. Last year the organization collected 20,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads.
