International Festival in Lafayette Offers Music, Culture, Food and…Recycling

Recycling bin at Festival International in Lafayette, Louisiana. Photo credit: Sadie Wilks 2026.

Every year, thousands of people from all over the world flock to the Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette to experience great music, food and art.

But with all the celebration, tons of trash accumulate. In the early years, the festival just sent it to a landfill. That was until Eldred “Griff” Blakewood, Professor of Geosciences at the University of Lafayette, proposed an alternative: recycling.

Blakewood died in 2014, but his legacy lives on.

Mauri Robichaux has been the lead of garbage and recycling for the past 19 festivals. She said the festival is lucky to have attendees who make recycling easy. Most festival goers use the proper recycling containers set up throughout the festival grounds, she said. 

“They’re very environmentally conscious,” Robichaux said. “It’s just the type of people that do go to festival.”

The festival, which opened Wednesday and closes Sunday, is set up in stages, with a new stage opening each day for the first three days. Every morning, before the festivities begin, more than 200 volunteers put out the recycling containers strategically near food and drink areas.

The majority of the recycling containers are made of metal and have bags visible to volunteers and attendees. Everywhere there is a garbage can, there is a recycling container next to it. Volunteers empty the containers as they fill up. Robichaux said festival goers often alert volunteers that a container needs to be emptied.

The collected recycling then goes to Acadiana Waste Services, a locally-owned waste hauling company. Last year, the festival had some extra help from BackYard Sapphire Glass Recycling, which converts glass into mulch and sand to be reused.

BackYard Sapphire was co-founded by Dawn Vincent, 53, who has lived in Lafayette most of her life. The idea started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Vincent could no longer take her glass bottles to Baton Rouge.

“We started it basically because there was no other option,” Vincent said.

Vincent said she has been going to Festival International for as long as she could remember. She also regularly volunteers on the Wednesday before the festival to help prepare food for musicians.

BackYard Sapphire helped recycle about 900 gallons of glass from the festival last year. After the glass is converted to sand, Vincent said the company sells it to clients and to Lafayette’s Consolidated Government for sandbags.

After the festival, a group of temporary workers helped empty and pick up the recycling containers. Robichaux said she tries to make the group of volunteers and workers a community. Even though she is leading her team, she said she is also right there with them.

“I’m getting just as dirty and grimy as they are as we’re doing it,” she said. “It’s not the cleanest job, but you treat people with respect.”

She said she thinks that is what makes most volunteers and temporary workers come back every year. This is true for Neysha Perry, who has been volunteering at the festival for 18 years. But her connection to the festival started when she was a child, going every year with her mom.

“Growing up, it was like a family reunion,” Perry said of the festival. “It was just this amazing playground of magic and entertainment and culture and food.”

Perry started volunteering with the recycling crew in her junior year of college, thanks to her professor at the time, the person who started it all, “Griff” Blakewood.

Blakewood took his students, including Perry, to help build recycling bins. Perry was worried that volunteering would mean missing out on her favorite parts of the festival, but the opposite was true.

“Festival was family and then community, and then the community became a family,” she said.

That family even gave Perry a nickname, “Swirl Girl,” from her signature swirl logo-covered outfits, which she creates and wears to the festival.

Perry, who now lives in Arizona, still flys in every year to attend and volunteers for about 20 hours at the festival. She said she takes pride in knowing the festival’s recycling effort exists because she helped create it.

“I want to know I’ve done everything in my power to make sure the festival continues and thrives,” Perry said.

Like Perry, Robichaux, the recycling coordinator, also has a long history with the festival. She has lived in Lafayette for 49 of her 57 years, and being a part of the festival is a family tradition. Both of her parents volunteered to clean the bathrooms, and friends of the family played in some of the bands that performed. Robichaux said she got her eco-conscious passion from her parents, as well.

She said she also saw firsthand in 2004 how long it takes discarded items to decompose. While working for the city, she came across debris in an old landfill.

“I found a newspaper from 1964 that I could still read,” Robichaux said. “It had been in the ground for 40 years, and I could still read it.”

In addition to recycling, the festival was able to eliminate Styrofoam, which is made of materials that cannot be broken down. All festival food containers must be biodegradable or recyclable.

Robichaux said the festival typically recycles six to 10 tons of waste every year.

“We want to show that we care about the world we live in and that we want to protect the entire world, not just here,” Robichaux said.