BURBANK, Calif. – Burbank's float, featuring a phoenix, soared at this year’s Rose Parade, but what happens to all the materials after the parade passes by?  

“This is a vial," said Ginny Barnett, President of the Burbank Tournament of Roses Association. “You can see that there are holes and each of those holes had a vial in it with a rose or an iris.”

All told, she thinks they used over 10,000 vials in this year's float. That is a lot of plastic, but volunteers go the extra mile to make sure they aren’t single use. Each cylinder is soaked, scrubbed and dried and stored for next year.

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Barnett says Burbank is a leader when it comes to keeping float materials out of the landfill.

“When Pasadena Tournament of Roses wanted to know about recycling, they came to us," Barnett said.

Every bucket is scrubbed and cleaned with bleach and water to prevent them from growing mildew. Steel will either be sold for scraps or used again next year. And then there are the flowers themselves.

“These are float wannabees," Barnett said, walking past buckets filled with leftover mums. "They just didn’t make the cut.”

All the natural materials on the float are collected in three large dumpster and will be turned into compost and used throughout the city. Vice President Steve Edward has been working on floats since his Cal Poly days and is constantly raising the bar in term of sustainability, including what goes into those vials being washed.

 

 

 

“We’re the only float builder to use reclaimed water in the vials that our flowers go into," Edward said.

Of course, not every piece of the float can be reused or recycled.  There is no way to repurpose the foam, for instance. They still need to break it down. It is a tedious task so they have come up with an incentive to get kids to eagerly tear it apart.

“There are several handfuls of coins hidden around the base of the float," Edward announced over the loudspeaker in the warehouse on Olive Avenue. "You find them, you’re welcome to keep them.”

Each float takes a year to plan and build so saying good bye is hard.

“When I got here yesterday they had already taken Paradise’s head off," Barnett said, "so it was a sad state for me.”

But after 29 floats, she says she has learned to let go.

“The first seven or eight years I did this, I couldn’t come down here for deconstruct," Barnett remembered. "After that, I kind of got to the point we need to move on for the next year.”

This was Barnett's eighth year as president and she says she has been asked to run again, which she plans to do.

“Some people come to me and go, you know, ‘You do this for free,’" she recalled, "and I said ‘It’s my best addiction and it’s a passion I have for life.'”

Thirty years in and the bloom still isn’t off the rose.