No two ways about it, Mardi Gras makes a mess.

This year, the city of Mobile and partner organizations that are trying to cut down on the trash have a new focus: Discouraging the use of glow sticks.

“Say No to the Glow” is the latest twist on the longstanding effort to cut down on the environmental impact of the city’s parading season, when paraders throw tons of beads and other plastic trinkets to crowds that may add up to more than a million people.

Inevitably, throws and food wrappers end up on the ground. Efforts to mitigate the damage start with the massive cleanup crew that follows every parade and longstanding efforts to collect as much recyclable waste as possible. There also have been efforts to screen storm drains to keep beads out of waterways (and to clean up beads already in them) and efforts to promote biodegradable beads.

During the 2024 Mardi Gras season, more than 11,000 pounds of recyclable materials were collected along the parade routes, including 1,574 pounds of beads, according to the city. Partners in the “Cleaner, Greener LoDa” effort include the Alabama Coastal Foundation, the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, the Downtown Mobile Alliance and Keep Mobile Beautiful.

“Say No to the Glow” puts a new emphasis on glow sticks and related toys that use a chemical reaction to produce light. It’s not the chemicals inside the plastic sticks and necklaces that are the problem: Studies have found them not to be particularly toxic, though you wouldn’t want to drink them. Rather, it’s the sheer volume of plastic involved, and the fact that none of it can be recycled because it’s contaminated by the chemicals.

For the city, there’s another problem: The sticks don’t play well with its street sweepers.

“They jam up the street sweepers and so then they have to stop and rake them out,” said Mark Berte, executive director of the Alabama Coastal Foundation. “So it’s really a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Berte said the city reached out to parading organizations last fall with its concerns. “You can hopefully see less glow sticks this year than there were in the past,” he said. “So we were ahead of that, encouraging people to do the right thing voluntarily. The city has been very much a leader on trying to encourage that.”

Given that the glowing necklaces are a popular throw, it’s inevitable that some still will be thrown, and that some of those will end up on the ground. So part of the campaign is to encourage the people in the crowd to dispose of them properly.

“You can help, everybody can help keep it clean by picking them up if you see them on the ground,” Berte said.

The city also encourages Mardi Gras visitors to dispose of their own garbage in the designated purple garbage carts throughout Downtown and to deposit aluminum, paper, plastic, and beads in the recycling bins in Bienville Square and Cathedral Square.

The Alabama Coastal Foundation’s figures show that the Cleaner, Greener LoDa “Eco-Team” started out by collecting “100 pounds of aluminum and 12 giant bags full of plastic bottles” at Mardi Gras in 2013 and has seen that grow to 11,739 pounds of recyclables last year.