Matsuri 2018

Project proposal

UW Matsuri has been the Japanese Student Association's main annual event for over 10 years. Matsuri, meaning festival in Japanese, is an event where we display the rich culture of Japan with delicious Japanese food, festive and thematic Japanese games, and many exciting and traditional performances. Along with the many foods that we sell, we create a lot of waste in the form of plates, utensils, napkins, and water bottles, among others. As a culture, Japanese society has increased its efforts to protect the environment through more efficient waste management and better technology to reduce resource consumption, and to reflect this we in the Japanese Student Association would also like to take the initiative to make our event and our attendees more aware of the environmental impact. As a student led event run primarily by the officers in the RSO and other student volunteers, we hope to begin making this push for a more sustainable event for this Matsuri and all future Matsuri's to come, and through this funding we hope to significantly reduce waste on campus at our 600 attendee event. Not only that, we really strive to educate both our staff and our attendees through volunteer orientations and allocating more volunteers to monitor waste disposal to ensure that all of our new biodegradable ware will be properly disposed.

Although it will be a challenge, we are confident that by working with the HUB and through our own careful planning and budgeting, we will be able to eliminate all plastic waste at our event. Regarding the specific uses of our funding, we will primarily focus on biodegradable tableware and utensils, which we estimate will cost us $400 to completely replace our old plastic ware. In addition, we will focus on getting water dispensers to eliminate plastic water bottle waste, which we estimate will cost us $600 to purchase. With any remaining money, we will focus on creating signage for the event to help people correctly dispose of their waste during the event, which, along with the water dispensers, can be reused for all of our future Matsuri events.