Waste man­age­ment inno­va­tion improves recy­cling at fes­ti­vals

There were alto­geth­er almost 200 garbage and recy­cling bins in the fes­ti­val area. In the pho­to, Mikko Hau­ru, the CEO of Hau­ru. Pho­to: Taina Ronkainen

Qstock is the biggest music fes­ti­val held in North­ern Fin­land. Dur­ing the fes­ti­val week­end in 2021, over 16 000 kg of waste was col­lect­ed into garbage bins. By analysing the com­po­si­tion of the con­tent in the bins, a lot can be learned in order to raise the recy­cling rate of fes­ti­vals.

The organ­is­ers of the Qstock fes­ti­val have strug­gled with the recy­cling of plas­tic pints and shot glass­es. These sin­gle-use cups tend to end up on the ground and get bro­ken under the feet of the fes­ti­val crowd.

The Most Sus­tain­able Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture project offers a test plat­form for eco-inno­va­tions at fes­ti­vals. With the help of the project, Qstock and Hau­ru waste man­age­ment com­pa­ny part­nered to pilot an inno­va­tion called Hau­ru Smart Fes­ti­val Waste Man­age­ment Con­cept.

Hau­ru brought sep­a­rate recy­cling bins for plas­tic pints and shot glass­es, cable ties, burn­able waste, card­board waste and biowaste to the fes­ti­val area. Each bin had a sen­sor for mon­i­tor­ing the amount of waste in the bin. The con­cept also includ­ed a com­po­si­tion analy­sis of the bins’ con­tents and a car­bon foot­print cal­cu­la­tion of the waste man­age­ment, car­ried out in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Macon con­sult­ing com­pa­ny.

“Such an exten­sive analy­sis of waste com­po­si­tion had not been car­ried out under fes­ti­val con­di­tions in Fin­land before,” reck­ons Mikko Ahokas, the CEO of Macon.

Recy­cling rate could be bet­ter

Dur­ing the fes­ti­val, over 16 000 kg of waste was col­lect­ed into the bins. How­ev­er, only 14 per­cent of that end­ed up for recy­cling.

The bins col­lect­ed over 14 000 kg of burn­able waste, about 2000 kg of card­board waste, 280 kg of biowaste and 150 kg of plas­tic pack­ages. Only 13 per­cent of the col­lect­ed burn­able waste was actu­al­ly burn­able waste: the rest could have been recy­cled, if it had been sort­ed cor­rect­ly.

Only 40 per­cent of the items col­lect­ed in recy­cling bins for plas­tic pints were made of plas­tic. There were, for exam­ple, glass bot­tles and tin cans with recy­cling deposits, and biowaste that soils the plas­tic waste and makes it unfit for recy­cling. In addi­tion, the plas­tic waste con­tained a mix­ture of dif­fer­ent plas­tic types, of which biodegrad­able plas­tic is prob­lem­at­ic, since it can­not be recy­cled among oth­er plas­tic types.

“Cater­ing ser­vices should be instruct­ed to order dish­es made of the same plas­tic type. When it comes to encour­ag­ing the recy­cling of deposit bot­tles, a cam­paign offer­ing to donate the deposit mon­ey to char­i­ty, for exam­ple, could be help­ful,” sug­gests Mikko Ahokas.

The pilot was a learn­ing expe­ri­ence

In addi­tion to the com­po­si­tion analy­sis, data from the sen­sors inside the bins sug­gests what kind of recy­cling bins are need­ed and where they should be placed to guar­an­tee enough recy­cling oppor­tu­ni­ties in the most crowd­ed places of the fes­ti­val area.

The waste man­age­ment car­bon foot­print dur­ing the fes­ti­val week­end was approx­i­mate­ly 5860 kg car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent. It is half of the annu­al car­bon foot­print of an aver­age Finnish per­son. By improv­ing the recy­cling rate, the car­bon foot­print of the fes­ti­val waste man­age­ment and the whole event could be dimin­ished.

Qstock fes­ti­val, Hau­ru and Macon are hap­py with the out­come of the pilot­ing and are going to con­tin­ue their fruit­ful coop­er­a­tion for a more eco-friend­ly fes­ti­val next year.

The Most Sus­tain­able Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture project is financed by the Euro­pean Region­al Devel­op­ment Fund and the Coun­cil of Oulu Region in 2019–2022.