Butler County residents aren't strangers to Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Arts Festival. There is ample opportunity to attend the two-week festival, which boasts more than 300 shows and exhibits.

But what 2008 festival-goers might have noticed, but might not have given much thought to, was the event's focus on being environmentally friendly. It's a focus that events in this county should strive to imitate.

There are plenty of large-scale events in Butler County that are candidates for an emphasis like Three Rivers', which resulted in only 16.4 percent of the festival's waste being sent to landfills, with the bulk being diverted for environmentally friendly recycling and composting.

By comparison, at last year's festival, 85 percent of waste was delivered to landfills.

Butler County events like the Regatta at Lake Arthur, Cruise-A-Palooza, Saxonburg Fireman's Carnival, the Big Butler Fair, Butler Farm Show and Ring In The Arts could, like the Three Rivers event, be a positive for the environment as well as for the people who attend.

The Three Rivers Festival's environmental focus was the result of a coordinated effort managed by Restorative Events, which was formed last year to research the best practices at events in other locales to help Pittsburgh events become more environmentally friendly.

According to an article in a Pittsburgh newspaper, Restorative Events quickly discovered that events elsewhere that were touting themselves as being eco-friendly were, in fact, not living up to those claims. So, Restorative Events shifted its priority to making them so.

The Three Rivers Festival was the first large-scale event on which Restorative Events focused, with the goal of making it green.

Eco-friendly products were used by food vendors — items such as starch drinking cups, which, although having the appearance of plastic, can be composted over just a period of months. Then there were the potato-starch eating utensils and wood-pulp plates, which also are compostable.

"Next arts festival, we'll have mulch, not a cup (in a landfill)," Ryan Walsh, Restorative Events founder, told the newspaper. "Everything at the arts festival that you receive in your hand is either recyclable or compostable."

Signs throughout the festival area provided directions as to how festival goers should dispose of their trash. Meanwhile, there were "instructors" at the disposal sites, helping to ensure that trash disposal was carried out properly, although this year the eco-disposal was not mandatory.

Those trash site observers also provided tips to festival goers on how to continue that environmental awareness in their homes.

To its credit, Restorative Events is moving beyond its Three Rivers Arts Festival efforts, while remaining committed to additional festival improvements in future years. The organization wants to be a leader in creating a national green event standard that will be accepted by the federal government and be implemented nationwide.

This year's festival showed that the organization has what it takes to make a difference in terms of the environment. And, its experience can be helpful to Butler County, if those in charge of events here make the effort to imitate what happened this year at the Three Rivers event.

There are many Butler County residents who have deep concerns about the state of the environment and what the future might hold. Many would be willing to be active participants — be willing to work — to help ensure that the waste this county's events generate can, in the end, be an asset, rather than a detriment, to Planet Earth.

What happened at this year's Three Rivers Festival is a beginning with myriad possibilities. Butler County should become a player in turning some of those possibilities into reality.