Kasarani Day, a community gathering bringing together vendors, performers and residents from across our service area, generates in a single afternoon roughly what several ordinary collection days combine to produce. Supporting waste management for the event, rather than leaving it to informal handling, taught us things about short, high-intensity waste spikes that our normal weekly rhythm doesn't really prepare us for.

Why event waste is a genuinely different problem

Our standard model is built around predictable, roughly steady weekly volumes per village, with staffing and routes planned accordingly. A single-day event concentrates a comparable volume of waste, much of it single-use food packaging and drink containers, into just a few hours, in one location, with no advance segregation habit to rely on since attendees aren't necessarily residents already familiar with our three-bin system.

How we planned for the event

Rather than trying to run our normal route logistics for the event, we set up temporary, clearly labelled collection points at several locations across the event grounds, staffed by volunteers rather than relying on attendees to seek out a bin on their own. Recyclable and general waste were kept separate from the outset through labelled points, with a dedicated team doing periodic sweeps to consolidate and remove filled containers before they overflowed, rather than waiting for a single end-of-day collection.

What worked well

The clearly labelled, frequent points genuinely helped — attendees used them reasonably well once the segregation choice was made simple and visible, without requiring the kind of household-level education we invest in for our regular route participants. Recovering a meaningful share of the day's plastic and can waste for our buy-back stream, rather than treating all event waste as general disposal, was a small but real win given that most attendees had no prior context on our segregation categories.

What didn't work as well

Our initial staffing underestimated how quickly points would fill during peak event hours, leading to some overflow before our sweep team could reach a given point — a similar staffing lesson to what we learned from our Zimmerman second sorting yard pilot, where underestimating a new site's ongoing attention needs caused early problems there too. We also found that food vendors at the event generated more organic waste than we'd planned collection capacity for, since our standard organic waste handling assumes a weekly household rhythm, not a single-day commercial food volume.

What we'd do differently next time

Future event support will include a dedicated organic waste stream sized specifically around vendor stalls rather than folding it into our general event collection plan, and staffing calculated around peak attendance hours rather than an average across the full event duration. We're also considering brief, simple signage-based segregation instructions specifically designed for one-off attendees unfamiliar with our system, rather than relying on labelling alone.

Why we think this kind of event support matters

Beyond the immediate waste management value, supporting visible community events is a genuine opportunity to introduce segregation habits to residents who may not yet be on our regular collection route, in a low-stakes, one-off setting rather than asking for an ongoing household commitment upfront. Several attendees who engaged with segregated bins at Kasarani Day have since reached out about joining our regular collection route in their area.

What event organisers should know if planning something similar

  • Plan for waste volume concentrated in hours, not spread across a normal collection schedule, and staff accordingly.
  • Use clearly labelled, frequently placed collection points rather than assuming attendees will seek out a distant bin.
  • Budget separately for organic waste from food vendors, which behaves very differently from a household's weekly organic stream.
  • Reach out to us in advance if you're planning a community gathering in our service area; we're happy to support event-specific waste planning.

How this connects to our wider community engagement work

Supporting events like Kasarani Day sits alongside our other community-facing efforts, like our schools programme and community barazas, as another channel through which residents encounter our work outside the context of an existing collection route. Each of these touchpoints, in its own way, has fed into route expansion or new buy-back participation once residents who first engaged through an event or school session later reached out about ongoing services.

Frequently asked questions

Can Kasarani Waste Solution support waste management for other local events?

Yes, we're happy to discuss support for community gatherings within our service area; reach out in advance so we can plan staffing and collection points properly.

Is event waste segregation handled the same way as household segregation?

The same basic categories apply, but staffing, point placement and organic waste handling all need to be adjusted for concentrated, single-day volume rather than a steady weekly rhythm.

What happens to recyclables collected at community events?

They're sorted and routed into our standard plastic buy-back and recycling stream, the same as household-collected recyclables.

Read more about how we've learned similar staffing lessons in our piece on the Zimmerman sorting yard pilot.