Cleanest & Greenest

The Portland Rose Festival is proud to celebrate over 20 years of award-winning Clean and Green parades in Portland.

Special thanks to all of the members of the Cleanest & Greenest Team: Portland General Electric, SOLVE, City of Portland (Bureau of Transportation), City of Portland (Maintenance Operations), Alaska Airlines, Heiberg Garbage & Recycling, Metro Regional Services, the Portland Police Bureau and TriMet. Give them all a big hand!

You can be a part of our Cleanest & Greenest team by making a charitable contribution to the Portland Rose Festival Foundation to help cover the cost of things like parade route trash bags and CityFair recycling stations!
Or sign up to volunteer!

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• Longtime partner, Portland General Electric, continues to make the PGE/SOLVE Starlight Parade and the Spirit Mountain Casino Grand Floral Parade carbon-neutral by purchasing carbon offsets to counter the carbon emissions of this year’s parade entries. An estimated 9 tons of carbon dioxide is emitted by the cars, floats and motorcycles in the parade – even the garbage trucks and street cleaners contribute to the carbon. PGE also purchases enough offsets to cover the entire run of CityFair, the Rose Festival’s largest event, so the estimated 106,000-kilowatt hours of power used by the rides and the vendors could be offset by investments in wind power and other renewable energy sources.
• Volunteers distribute bags along the parade routes, then collect them after the parade, to help parade viewers keep the streets of Portland clean.
• The clean-up trucks are part of the parade! They spray and sweep and pack the trash as they make their way tucked closely behind the last unit of the parades. They’re decorated, with lights for the PGE/SOLVE Starlight Parade and with balloons and festoons for the Spirit Mountain Casino Grand Floral Parade and the Fred Meyer Junior Parade.
• Portland is so good at keeping it green that we were named the North American host for the 2013 World Environment Day celebration by the United Nations Environment Programme, 1 of 5 host cities selected around the world!
• In 2013, a large scale waterfront restoration project led by the Parks Department was completed. The two-part facelift intended to provide the .5 mile park with better drainage and promote healthy and speedy grass growth. The Portland Rose Festival is Waterfront Park’s largest event, so it’s fitting that the organization is also the largest single contributor to the restoration efforts. The Portland Rose Festival Foundation contributed $100,000 (nearly one-third of the project’s total cost!).

Help us keep our parades clean and green by volunteering!