School and community leaders planning a fete or market – listen up! We’ve got some great ideas for stalls that minimise waste and connect your community with recycling and reuse opportunities.
Be sure to let your school and neighbourhood know how they can contribute to stalls, what reusable equipment they should bring, and how to follow any recycling or composting initiatives on the day.
Running a zero waste event is a mighty fete feat, so start with these eight minimal-waste fete stall ideas.
1. Secondhand clothes, books, and sporting goods
Kids can grow out of reading and sporting phases as quickly as they do clothes and shoes, so set up secondhand stalls for all of the above! Put a call-out for donations in school or community newsletters and on social media in the lead-up to the event, then donate any leftovers to op shops like the Salvos and Vinnies afterwards. There may even be a few books or soccer balls that can find a happy home in classrooms or rec centres.
2. Mutant toy stall
A lot of young families have a few weird Barbies and odd Lego blocks floating around the house. You can make use of these well-loved but worn-out toys at a mutant toy stall.
Ask families to donate broken and unloved toys so you can deconstruct these into their essential parts – think heads, limbs, clothes, wheels, and other accessories. On the day, kids can assemble mutant toys with help from a few adult stallholders wielding hot glue guns. You could charge a flat fee for each creation, or have a pay-per-piece policy.
Your school or community group could also invest in a Toys Zero Waste Box to collect and recycle even more toys on-site.
3. Waste-free food stalls
Marketgoers require sustenance, but food stalls often produce a lot of waste. Here are a few tips to cut back as much as possible:
- If your school or community group is asking for homemade food and drink donations, ask everyone to package these in reusable containers and pick them up after the event.
- Ask attendees to bring their own reusable coffee cups, water bottles, and cutlery if possible. You can offer $0.50 discounts as an incentive.
- Set up a washing station and offer reusable plates and utensils. Otherwise, use paper plates and wooden cutlery that can be recycled and composted.
- Have composting bins for food scraps and a recycling station for paper near food stalls. If you don’t have an on-site compost, donate organics to your neighbours through apps like ShareWaste.
- Make sure people have access to bubblers or water refill stations to banish bottled water.
- Got leftovers? Food rescue groups like OzHarvest and SecondBite may be able to redistribute this to locals in need. Otherwise, have a giveaway towards the end of the fete.
4. DIY jar lucky dip
You don’t need to spend big bucks to create an awesome lucky dip. Start collecting empty jars and bottles to fill with homemade, pre-loved, and minimal-waste prizes. Plastic-free soaps and beauty products, homemade jams and relishes, paper-wrapped chocolate, pre-loved action figures, and unused art equipment all make for great jarable presents. Since many containers will be clear, lucky dippers will need to pull a number at random to be matched with a win.
Consider donating any leftovers to charity, and recycle any empty containers kerbside (making sure your council recycling service accepts the different types of plastic containers you’ve used).
5. ‘How to deal with rubbish responsibly’ guessing game
Add extra waste minimisation education to the day with this guessing game. Participants will choose the most responsible way to dispose of different types of rubbish by placing items in the following categories.
- Rubbish that can commonly be recycled kerbside (e.g. glass bottles and cardboard packaging)
- Hard-to-recycle rubbish accepted through TerraCycle’s free recycling programs or Zero Waste Boxes (e.g. used makeup pallets and coffee capsules)
- Waste that will break down in a home compost (e.g. vegetable scraps and leaf litter)
- Items that could be repaired or repurposed with relative ease (e.g. a shirt with a tear and an empty pot plant container)
- Items that should go to landfills – but make it a trick question, because you can reuse, repair, recycle, or rot almost everything!
If players put all items in the correct categories, they win vouchers for small purchases at fete food stalls.
6. Craft table
Craft can keep kids entertained for hours, and it’s often a great way to make use of household odds and ends. Here are a couple of minimal-waste craft options families can participate in for a small donation.
- Sock puppets
Let your community know you’ll run a sock puppet station and ask them to bring in their spare socks. If you supply a few googly eyes, fabric offcuts, and staplers, kids can transform these lonely noodles into friendly new toys.
- Paper flowers
Get your whole school or community to save old magazines, discarded drawings, and used wrapping paper from gifts or fancy loo rolls (like the colourful collection from Who Gives a Crap) to make paper flowers. You can even make the stems by cutting cardboard toilet rolls into strips. Then all you’ll need is a few dabs of glue to bring it altogether.
Roughly cut circles of four different sizes, and group them by size and colour. Then, kids can layer and scrunch these to create petals, securing the lot by piercing the centre and threading through the cardboard, then finish it off with a button that sits on top. You can find hordes of pre-loved buttons at op shops and repair cafes, and recycle all the paper scraps in your kerbside bins after the fete.
7. Plant swap
Ask attendees to bring in plant cuttings, seedlings, or whole pot plants to swap at the fete and make your neighbourhood a little greener. Source a base of leafy donations ahead of time to get the ball rolling, and ensure a greenthumb is on hand to supervise swaps and answer questions about plant varieties and growing requirements.
8. Fundraising raffle on leaves
Many hands will make light work of this crafty raffle concept. Rather than buying a fresh book of raffle tickets, prune a few large-leafed trees and get your community busy with markers numbering these for a fundraising raffle. Leave this job until a few days before your event to avoid wilting.
The prize could be a basket of handy reusable cleaning, storage, and bathroom supplies, or an all-in-one Zero Waste Box to recycle almost anything from around your home or workplace.
If kids have questions about why you’ve implemented waste-reduction initiatives at your event, tackle the topic of recycling with this kid-friendly guide.
TerraCycle News 