DAVID ERICKSON

WESTERN MONTANA FAIR

Roughly 125,000 people will have visited the Western Montana Fair held in Missoula last week, once the final numbers are tallied. And almost all of them consumed fair food at some point, from Indian tacos to acai bowls to barbecue sandwiches to the famous Sons of Norway Vikings (a meatball with onions on a stick, breaded and fried with Scandinavian spices).

And all that fair food causes more than a "fair" amount of trash. Actually, a tremendous, almost unfathomable, amount of garbage for a six-day event.

But the fair organizers, along with local nonprofit Home ReSource and a team of volunteers, worked hard every single day to keep over 60,000 pounds of that trash (more than the weight of the Zipper) from going to the landfill. That number represents

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