PROVIDENCE — Starting Thursday, the city will host a six-week party in a designated area of the city serving as an official FIFA World Cup Fan Zone for matches at Gillette Stadium, and some are questioning the city’s preparedness to deal with the waste that will undoubtedly result.

From June 11 to July 19, Station Park will serve as a hub for World Cup soccer fans, with watch parties, live music, interactive games, local food trucks, and a beer, wine and spirits garden, according to city officials, who are describing it as “the biggest party south of Foxborough.”

But unlike many host cities participating in events surrounding the World Cup, Providence hasn’t released either a sustainability plan or a plan to manage the single-use plastic, trash, and food waste that will be accumulated during such an event, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people.

“When it comes to attendance, all that any of us has is based on speculation,” said Joe Wilson Jr., director of the city’s office of arts, culture, and tourism (ACT), the department organizing the Fan Zone event. “This is the first time that FIFA is taking place across three countries in over a dozen cities, and so we’re grappling with the operational production challenges that this presents.”

Wilson said early estimates anticipate that the Providence area will welcome about 2 million outside participants to the variety of different events offered. He said he has heard that Providence specifically could have an extra 400,000 people staying in the city, effectively tripling the current population.

Wilson said fans will likely engage with the events in different ways, with some commuting to Foxborough, Mass., to watch the games, while others will use events like the Fan Zone to keep up with the World Cup while staying in Providence.

The Fan Zone will be held at Station Park, a green space next to the Providence Train Station and across the street from the Statehouse and Providence Place. Wilson said city officials chose the location specifically because it’s far enough away from any residential buildings to help manage noise pollution, and because it’s a relatively contained environment.

But Station Park borders the tidal Providence River, and residents are concerned that’s where the six weeks’ worth of waste will end up.

Providence officials said they hope the river doesn’t see levels of waste similar to years past. According to ACT and the city’s Department of Public Works, waste management measures for the Fan Zone include installing two 30-yard roll-off dumpsters on Finance Way. One dumpster will be used for trash and the other will be for recycling, and 25 sets of smaller trash and recycling bins will be installed throughout Station Park.

The city’s parks department will be in charge of cycling the trash from the small bins to the larger dumpsters Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.-3 p.m., and on the off hours there will be private vendors to cycle the waste, city officials said.

Jarrod Holgate, stormwater supervisor for the Woonsquatucket River Watershed Council (WRWC), said, “[Cleanup] is difficult in normal times, so having a big event that we know is going to cause a lot of single-use plastics and possibly a lot of litter, can definitely feel a little bit foreboding as to what’s going to end up in the river.”

The Providence River is part of the Woonsquatucket watershed and is managed in part by the WRWC. Holgate said keeping the Providence River clean is part of the group’s mission statement, with the goal being that the river will be safe to swim and fish in by 2040. The mission requires constant vigilance between managing stormwater runoff and cleaning the waste in the river itself. WRWC members not only wade into the river every other week to collect litter but also run a “river bandit,” a little robot that floats up and down the river collecting waste.

“Trash is very seasonal,” Holgate said. “Last year around the 4th of July we were getting a lot of balls, empty firework containers, and little plastic American flags [in the river].”

According to the WCWA, by June 27 last year, the total plastic poundage collected from the river was 7 pounds and the total trash came out to 22 pounds. After last year’s July 4^th festivities, 18 pounds of plastic and 39 pounds of trash were collected from the river.

The Fan Zone activities, unlike the July 4^th events that are usually contained within the week of the holiday, will last the six weeks that the World Cup runs.

In addition to the Fan Zone activities, Wilson said, there will be multiple different musicians, activities, and education events. He said some of these events were specifically organized to inform participants on how to improve waste management practices. According to Wilson, after the event is over the city’s parks department will also participate in a restoration plan to repair the grass of Station Park.

“In my opinion the plan that’s in place should work out well,” said Brandon Olson, director of environmental services at DPW. “It’s very achievable to keep all the extra waste and recyclables consolidated to the Station Park area and avoid any runoff that might end up in the nearby waterways.”

According to Olson, all the organizers of the event are ready to change their plans if the expectations for the amount of waste don’t match the reality.

“Say [we] get into it and recognize that the volume and the capacity don’t match up, we can be ready to bring in reinforcements of carts or whatever we need to make sure we’re keeping everything contained to the Station Park area as best we can,” he said.

Wilson said when it comes to an event as big and unprecedented as the Fan Zone, “So much of what we are doing is an unknown. You can talk to any other city and they will tell you the same thing. We’ve used PVD Fest as a model for everything from budgeting to production to operations, but then we’ve multiplied that time to 39 days.”

Wilson said he’s confident that the planning that the city has done will be effective. He said that the city’s greatest strength is that it’s small and “scrappy,” allowing organizers to adapt to any unseen challenges.

“We are ready to respond based upon any number of unknown circumstances. That’s what we do as a city. So if we need to bring in more barrels, we will. If we need to increase the number of pickups each week, we will. If we need support from other vendors in the city who are already really engaged with Fan Zone as we speak, we will deploy the extra support,” Wilson said. “We are perfectly ready to ‘flex,’ as we are calling it.”

Residents also worry about  a rise in carbon dioxide emissions due to the increased traffic that the city will experience over the six weeks of the World Cup. Brown University’s Breathe Providence, a community focused air monitoring network in the city, said that even on a normal day there is a sharp increase in CO2 emissions during to the city’s rush hours. These increases in emissions can cause detrimental health impacts such as breathlessness, headaches, nausea, and chest pain and, in neighborhoods adjacent to the highways, residents can develop severe complications like various cardiorespiratory diseases and asthma. For residents already impacted by these complications even short-term exposure to poor air quality can worsen the symptoms.

When asked about the increases in local traffic that Fan Zone and the World Cup at large will cause, Wilson said, “Any increased vehicular traffic or pollution that is created as a result of increased travel is never a good thing, but while I am not an expert on emissions, what I will say is that we’re hopeful that people will use public transportation. We are hopeful that folks will ride share.”

Wilson said residents can be part of the organizing process and help the city manage waste through the six weeks of the event. Those interested can go to pvdfanzone.com and apply to volunteer.