Festivals in general have a bad reputation for making a huge mess, leaving piles of rubbish, and generally caring less about the environment than about having fun. This reputation is largely undeserved, as many events put huge effort into sustainability projects and minimising their footprint. The piles of rubbish do exist, but the vast majority of events ensure the site is left cleaner than they found it, often at great cost to the organisers.
With the recent discoveries we’ve made while operating the NimBinChickens project, along with good sustainability practices at the event level, we believe that we can now eliminate landfill almost entirely from the festival equation.
How?
Step 1: Reduce waste brought into the event. This includes methods such as banning glass, ensuring all market stalls use biodegradable packaging, and providing reusable food utensils. This is the single most effective way to reduce end waste on any site, anywhere.
Step 2: Minimise waste produced at the event. This step is largely about education and making it simple for attendees to adopt sustainable practices. Providing separate containers for food scraps, recycling, and soft plastics greatly reduces the effort attendees need to put in, and encourages compliance. The old slogan of “Leave No Trace” still applies, along with “If you had space to bring it here, you have space to take it home”.
Step 3: Keep it clean! An efficient cleanup crew ensures attendees don’t need to look at rubbish on the ground, which has a twofold benefit. Firstly, attendees are happier in a clean space! Secondly, “monkey see, monkey do”. Rubbish on the ground leads to more rubbish on the ground. Pick it all up before it becomes a problem.
Step 4: Sort EVERYTHING! A burn pile or incinerator is necessary to complete this step properly. Certain things simply can’t be dealt with safely any other way – toilet paper, wound dressings, and various other biohazards come to mind. Burn it immediately. Everything else has a place to go, from batteries to broken camp gear to bits of plastic. This step is usually assisted by numerous event volunteers, who often enjoy the job much more than they expected!
Step 5: Take all recovered resources to places they are appreciated. Paper and cardboard, compost, bottles and cans, metal, along with all the reclaimed items are all valued as resources.
Step 6: All that soft plastic…and lids, and cable ties, leftover bits and pieces. What about that? That goes into an oven to melt into hard sheets, then gets fed to the plastic recycling machines maintained by the NimBinChickens project! Then we turn it all into beams and cutting boards and benches and strange containers – and you can play with the end results too!
And then, you’ll find, there is no landfill left at all.
Feel free to use this information to improve your own event’s sustainability practices, while crediting any data used to Recovery Instinct.
Or if you’d like us to get involved with your event personally, please get in touch via our contact page, so we can discuss the necessary details with you. With over a decade of industry experience, we are confident we can assist in bringing your event to a whole new level of sustainability.