Good times, green vibes
Heading to a big event or festival shouldn’t mean leaving behind your green sensibilities. Aaron Leaman reports.
There aren’t many silverhaired nonagenarians who can work a crowd of 200,000 young people into a frenzy.
When Sir David Attenborough took to the main stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, in the UK, he received the sort of raucous welcome normally reserved for music royalty.
Attenborough praised festival organisers for their anti-plastic campaign, including their stance to ban the sale of single-use plastic water bottles at the event.
‘‘That is more than a million bottles of water that have not been drunk by you in plastic,’’ the 93-year-old declared to loud applause.
It was a feelgood moment and a reflection of the public’s growing awareness of the harm plastics have on the natural world.
Yet Glastonbury also served to highlight the challenges organisers face when trying to host an eco-friendly event.
After Glastonbury’s revellers departed, photos emerged of rubbish – including plastic – scattered across the site’s fields. The ban on plastic-bottle sales didn’t deter some punters from bringing their own plastic into the venue.
When Raglan’s Soundsplash Festival began in 2001, one of the biggest waste problems was revellers dumping couches.
Careful messaging about what festivalgoers could – and couldn’t – bring into the event helped remedy the problem, says Soundsplash managing director Naomi Tuaopepe.
From the beginning, Soundsplash’s green sensibilities were a natural fit with the Waikato town, which has a proud reputation for sustainability.
However, as Soundsplash’s reputation spread, a new, younger generation of revellers descended on the seaside town in search of good tunes and good vibes.
And it’s what some partygoers left behind at this summer’s event that thrust the festival into the spotlight and prompted debate over society’s throwaway culture.
About 250 cut-price tents were abandoned at Wainui Reserve, along with other camping paraphernalia. Many of the discarded tents were bought from The Warehouse and sold for less than $20.
For organisers, the mess was a bitter blow and detracted from the eco-friendly initiatives run at the event.
Soundsplash is committed to zero waste and, in partnership with community enterprise Xtreme Zero Waste, achieved an 86 per cent waste diversion from this year’s event. In 2018, it was accredited as a plastic bag-free event.
While the discarded rubbish – dubbed ‘‘camp-ageddon’’ – caused discontent in Raglan, anyone familiar with the town knows it’s a community built on creativity and ingenuity.
In search of a solution to festival waste, Soundsplash and Xtreme Zero Waste teamed up with polytech students from
Wintec’s Design Factory to devise a solution.
Soundsplash organiser Brian Ruawai says the dumping of cheap tents and camping gear is an issue most festivals are grappling with.
‘‘All of a sudden there was a flood on to the market with festival tents that wasn’t there maybe three or four years ago,’’ Ruawai says.
Working in two groups, Wintec students were given 15 weeks to research the issue of waste at ticketed events and pitch a solution.
One group came up with a ‘‘life hacks’’ series – short videos that can be shared on social media and used to promote behaviour change. The animated videos can detail such things as what can’t be brought into a festival, how to recycle, and how to pack tents.
The other solution was a bin station, dubbed ‘‘Bins for Change’’, that offer free wifi to lure in punters. A festival app tied to the bins educates users in how to dispose of waste correctly and rewards those who do with redeemable discounts on food and drink.
Design Factory director Margi Moore hopes an IT or communication student will implement the ideas and turn them into reality.
While the solutions’ intellectual property will be owned by Xtreme Zero Waste, Moore says the emphasis is on finding solutions that benefit everyone. ‘‘This is the sort of problem that everyone wants a solution to, so it’s a partnership model.
‘‘This is about making things better for the world.’’
One advantage of the life hacks proposal is it can be applied to a range of waste issues and is easy to implement.
‘‘If the problem became people dumping couches, the video series could address that,’’ Moore says.
Xtreme Zero Waste general manager of core business Dallas Butler says the camping waste left at Soundsplash sparked a renewed focus on society’s throwaway mentality.
And it also gave an impetus to finding a solution. Both ideas devised by Wintec students hold strong potential, he says, especially given their use of tech to reach young people.
‘‘The tent dumping created major ripples through the community but six or seven months later we’ve got a bunch of initiatives to push.’’
The Warehouse tents are of good quality and designed to be used time and again, says general manager of merchandise Jenny Epke in a statement.
The packaging for its tents includes messages about responsible camping. ‘‘We know that considerable work is underway to promote responsible environmental behaviours at festivals, both here and overseas, and we hope this will encourage people to adopt a more responsible attitude,’’ Epke says.
‘‘This year we have developed a tent which refolds in seconds
so there is no hassle involved in packing it away and reusing it.’’
Butler says because The Warehouse previously marketed its tents as part of a festival package, the company has a responsibility to ensure its products are durable.
‘‘Single-use tents and plastics aren’t sustainable. It’s a quick buck but it’s extremely costly environment-wise. The mentality of buying a single-use tent certainly wasn’t around 10 years ago.’’
Other festivals are exploring ways to combat tent dumping. At Rhythm and Alps, near Wanaka, organisers brought in waterproof-coated cardboard tents in 2018 as an alternative to cheap tents.
And at Rhythm and Vines, near Gisborne, punters can book pre-setup tents and accommodation such as teepees. Any abandoned tents that are salvageable are donated to local schools and charity groups.
Christchurch’s popular Nostalgia Festival has run for six years. Director Johnny Gibson says he wanted to make sustainability a value of the event from the start.
It diverted 89 per cent of its waste away from landfill this year, up from 54 per cent in 2017. It organises cycle gangs as transport to the festival, and hopes to have more than half of attendees leave their cars at home within two years.
All vendors use compostable food packaging – none of it
compostable plastic which the city council cannot process. Cafe vendors offer porcelain cups or the festival’s reusable hard plastic cups, no disposables. And in 2018 food waste was fed to a pig named Tulip, which was walked to the event.
Gibson says it is difficult to prevent unintended waste ‘‘creep’’. One year someone took in flyers for another event, which were ‘‘blowing around everywhere’’, and next year they would tell contractors to bring only reusable water bottles.
People were becoming more aware of event waste and demanding more sustainability-conscious festivals. After Nostalgia, there was no big clean-up, Gibson says.
‘‘You can walk in the next day and you wouldn’t have a clue anything had happened.’’
Where town meets country
Putting together the southern hemisphere’s largest ag expo takes planning.
Before this year’s Fieldays saw off the last of its 128,747 punters, work had already started on the 2020 incarnation.
For Fieldays staffer Janine Monk, the highlight of this year’s four-day event was rubbish – the throwaway kind, that is.
A self-confessed recycling evangelist, Monk spent large chunks of the event helping sort through the event’s rubbish.
Monk was part of a fourperson team that handled more than 3000kg of waste, managing to divert 81 per cent of it from landfill.
For the first time, all compostable packaging, food waste and coffee cups from Fieldays’ food courts, eateries, coffee carts, and large exhibitors were sent to a commercial composting facility. This move alone diverted 1500kg of waste from landfill.
Preliminary results show 67,437 kg of waste was generated from Fieldays this year – 20,000kg less than in 2018.
Despite her passion for recycling, Monk admits there’s no clean way of sorting through rubbish. ‘‘When we started sorting the paper towels from the toilets, that was fun. On the separating table, we’d open up the bags to sort through the towels, and came across a bra wire, lots of nappies, underpants covered in poo, and plastic bottles.
‘‘But doing that sort of stuff is what’s required . . . But I love it because I know I’m making a difference.’’
Recycling rubbish is just one of a suite of measures Fieldays is pursuing to minimise its environmental impact, chief executive Peter Nation says.
The event’s park and ride bus service was used by more than 13,900 punters this year, reducing the number of cars on the road, and carbon emissions.
The Fieldays app was also downloaded 42,394 times, cutting the demand for programmes and brochures.
Nation says Fieldays is proud of its sustainability initiatives, but it comes at a price.
‘‘From a business point of view, these initiatives cost our business. It’d be a lot cheaper to just chuck all the rubbish in the bin and take it to the dump.
‘‘Are these sustainability initiatives improving our bottom line? No, they aren’t. But is it helping to educate people? Yes, it is. Someone may catch a bus to Fieldays and that could educate them about the benefits of using public transport.’’
The message from festival and event organisers is clear having a good time doesn’t mean abandoning your green sensibilities.
For some New Zealand festivals, such as Taranaki’s Womad, sustainability is ingrained in its DNA.
The three-day event is based at the Bowl of Brooklands and is run by the Taranaki Arts Festival Trust. Its ticket sales typically reach more than 13,000.
Emere Wano is employed by the trust and works solely as Womad’s festival director.
Her job involves everything from working with overseas colleagues and planning the artistic programme, through to organising the toilets, showers,
and rubbish collection.
Womad ramped up its sustainability focus in 2007 with is zero waste programme.
Like Glastonbury, it also prohibits the sale of bottled water. Instead, free water fountains are provided. Punters are also allowed to bring in reusable goblets.
When it comes to disposing of waste, the human element is crucial, Wano says.
About 150 volunteers are involved in the festival’s ‘‘green team’’. Some of these volunteers are positioned outside the waste station, helping punters put their rubbish in the right place. Inside the station, more volunteers take the waste and sort it further.
‘‘For us, it’s really important to keep the Bowl of Brooklands and Pukekura Park as pristine as we can,’’ Wano says.
‘‘The biggest challenge with waste is you can’t just put bins and signs out and expect people to do the right thing because people are human and they don’t read. Without that human interaction, saying what goes where, it’s always going to fail.’’
Of the 250 or so tents left behind at Soundsplash, none were able to be reused.
Instead, the festival is working with Plastic Bag Free Raglan and Raglan Area School to turn the tents into bags and pouches.
The next Soundsplash is set down for January 2020. Like Rhythm and Vines, Tuaopepe and Ruawai are looking to implement a book-a-tent system.
Ruawai says the festival will also use its social media platforms to reinforce what can and can’t be brought into the site.
‘‘In Raglan we have a really supportive community around zero waste but not everyone comes from a town or community where that’s one of their main focuses,’’ he says.
Butler says the chance to educate young festivalgoers on eco-friendly values can have immense long-term benefits.
‘‘If a punter leaves trash behind and that behaviour is not addressed, they could repeat it at the next event they go to. Or the next time they’re at the beach or the park, they might leave rubbish behind.
‘‘The onus is on all of us to address this waste issue, it definitely doesn’t just land with one person or group.’’