One man’s trash is the Gear Closet’s treasure.
Volunteers with the outdoors-focused resale and consignment shop on Riverside Drive drove onto the 700-acre Bonnaroo site near Manchester, Tennessee, Monday morning as its roughly 60,000 visitors left. The nearly 30-member cleanup team scoured fields full of more than 1 million pounds of waste. They were searching for used but intact gear to bring back to Chattanooga to sell at the annual Gear Closet yard sale taking place Wednesday.
“Bonnaroo is trying to become more sustainable. It’s absolutely a win-win,” said Mary Beth Sutton, who leads the nonprofit that oversees the Gear Closet. “There’s less stuff that goes to the land fill, the festival becomes more sustainable and people get stuff. We also take a bunch to the [Chattanooga] Community Kitchen, too. It’s our biggest week of the year.”
The group met shortly after 8:30 a.m. near a tower topped with a large disco ball in the heart of the pop-up city. Sutton stood outside an old U.S. Xpress tractor-trailer the group would be using to transport their roughly four tons of treasure back to the shop. She divided the members into small groups and gave an overview of the day.
“If it doesn’t work, we don’t want it,” Sutton announced to the crew. “We’re going to start in the far reaches and see what we can find.”