My First Earth Day

We all know today is Earth Day. I was first involved in Earth Day when I did an internship at Des Moines' local landfill, Metro Waste Authority (MWA) in 1996-1997.

Trash isn't really my thing, but it was the coolest internship, and it was the reason I believe I got an actual marketing job in KC afterwards.

In a nutshell, I spent about 9-months hanging out at the landfill in Mitchellville, the recycling center on Euclid and at the Regional Collection Center for hazardous materials in Bondurant. Every month I'd hang out at the landfill for at least four hours driving around the landfill (I can vouch it's not a clean place, but it really doesn't smell as bad as it should) and interviewing workers for the newsletter. Once my car and me were even in a commercial at the recycling center.

The other side of this internship allowed me to sit in on meetings at the Capitol and at the City Council and do all sorts of marketing/PR/promotional activities around the residential recycling program (which was extremely new). One of my projects was participating in a group of city and state 'people' to plan Earth Day activities for Des Moines.

In 96-97, this wasn't a big deal like it is today. In fact, it was so lame I don't even remember what we ended up doing. I feel like we released balloons, but I'm sure we didn't since that's not friendly to the environment. I'm glad Earth Day is now bigger and better. And I have no doubt in my mind the 2008 MWA intern was much busier with this Earth Day than I was 11 years ago!