Our favourite summer photos!

 Ben has just come back from Green Events Europe which was held in Bonn on November 2nd and 3rd, and we were asked to provide some photos from some of the most inspiring and innovative summer festivals.  They were pinned up on some brillant display boards along with some great images from other festivals like Malmo and Ilosasrirock – So here they are – and many thanks to our two festival environmental auditors, Penny (Glastonbury, Open Air in the Czech Republic and We Love Green in Paris) and Helen (Wood and Camp Bestival) for these great pictures. Enjoy!

Glastonbury thanks the green travellers – nice compost loos too!

Glastonbury bike park

The Glastonbury Solar Cinema (above)

Open Air CZ recycling bins

Trams at Open Air CZ

Above (Czech) and below (France) – who needs bottled water??

We Love Green in France

We Love Green – solar powered stage

We Love Green France

Compost toilets – We Love Green

Solar Stage – We Love Green

The Solar Stage at Wood

Compost loos at Wood

…and finally, the kids loos at Camp Bestival

Glastonbury cans it!

The Glastonbury Festival have revealed that over 2 tonnes of drinks cans from the Festival were sent to Perrys recycling centre in Marston Magna in Somerset after this year’s festival, picked up by the Festivals dedicated team of litter pickers who clean the site by hand.

Glastonbury also announced that their ‘Green Traveller’ scheme was a real success in 2011, with car parking and car numbers being reduced for the first time. Car numbers were down by 4,600 vehicles. Green Travellers who came by bike or public transport were given their own camping area and discount vouchers for on-site facilities.

Glastonbury also said that despite a blisteringly hot final day, water use on site at the festival was down in 2011 as well. The Festival installed its own reservoirs last year and also swapped sewage disposal to a local farm, saving tankers having to bring drinking water on site and take human waste off site to a sewage plant near the coast.

Festivals smash 10:10!

The 10:10 campaign and music industry greening specialists Julie’s Bicycle have persuaded the organisers of some of the biggest and best events of the festival season to set out on a mission to reduce their emissions by 10% every year. The first major music festival of the summer, the Isle of Wight(IoW), reported savings of 22% from 2009’s event. Initiatives included boosting generators with biodiesel and solar arrays, and a comprehensive carbon audit (including ticketholder travel surveys). IoW’s sustainability programme has been planned and implemented by Eco Action Partnership over the past four years. Juliet Ross-Kelly from Eco Action Partnership, said “It has been a real challenge to tackle such a big events carbon footprint and of course we have had to learn a lot on the job with a few bits of trial and error along the way but thanks to campaigns such as 10:10 we have really focused our efforts and  have seen some great measurable results”.

Lovebox, one of London’s landmark summer events, smashed the 10% target. Replacing diesel generators with solar arrays, hydrogen fuel cells, vegetable oil and even bicycle power organisers we able to reduce emissions from onsite energy use by a whopping 38% in 2010, despite almost doubling ticket sales. Andy Mead, director at Firefly Solar and Lovebox’s head of sustainability, said “Lovebox made great progress last year making significant reductions. In 2011 we hope to make further reductions by building on last year’s success.”

A number of festivals calculated their emissions in 2010, implementing reduction strategies in the 2011 season. Festival Republic, set baseline carbon figures for four of their leading festivals in 2010; the greatest rock shows on the planet; the Reading & Leeds Festival, the critically applauded Latitude in Suffolk, and The Big Chill set in the beautiful rolling hills of Herefordshire. 2011 will see Festival Republic launch a range of innovative strategies tailored to each event – such as switching to cleaner sources of energy, initiatives to reduce water use, landfill waste, and increase recycling.

Greener Festival Award winner T in the Park, Scotland’s biggest festival, is aiming to reduce waste to landfill by 50% and diesel usage by 10% through increasing biodiesel use and improving energy efficiencies. And sometimes the best things come in small packages and Lounge on the Farm, the smallest of the 10:10 festivals, is no exception. Only six years old, Lounge on the Farm have already won two awards for sustainability including the Greener Festival Award and another Greener Festival Award winner Bestival, the last big bash of the summer, went all out for 10:10 last year with a 10:10 stand providing festival-goers with solar and bicycle phone charging. 2011 looks set to be another bumper year for Bestival
who hope to reach their 10% reduction through energy conservation and waste reduction.

“Music festivals are a staple of the British summer time – come rain or shine! Lovebox and Isle of Wight have proved that you can put on an amazing show AND cut carbon at the same time – smashing the10% target they set themselves in 2010. We can’t wait to see the savings the other festivals clock up this year” said Angela Bryant, 10:10’s executive director. “The challenge of reducing impacts while growing the business is being tackled head on by this group of festivals, it’s not always comfortable to put the green brand to the test. This group of festivals are doing it for real” said Alison Tickell, director of Julie’s Bicycle

Practical advice on water management at Festivals

This is the second report from the excellent GREEN EVENTS GERMANY conference in Bonn (3rd and 4th November) and there were some excellent panels at the conference which was hosted by the RhineKultur Festival, the European festivals organisation YOUROPE and Buckinghamshire New University. Lots of European festivals attended including the Wacken Festival, Melt! and Das Fest (all in Germany) Open Air St Gallen in Switzerland, Roskilde in Denmark , Ilosaarirock in Finland, Welcome to the Future and Pinkpop in the Netherlands and the Glastonbury Festival in the UK. There were also representatives from a number of organisations present including Julies Bicycle from the UK, Germany’s Green Music Initiative and the German federal agency for nature (Bundesamt fur Naturschutz) . I am blogging about two presentations from the ‘production’ seminar, firstly on sustainable power for mobile generators (see the earlier Blog)  and now  on water conservation.

Water! We all know that bottled water is incredibly wasteful – in the resources needed for packaging as well transport to a site – and waste remains after the water in drunk – and many greenfield festivals have to import water in tankers for drinking, washing, showers, toilets and for caterers. This was a really interesting talk from Jans Schonhoff from EventLogistiker (www.eventlogisticker.de) which gave some simple and key advice on reducing water use on site through simple and effective measures. These included

*  limiting the time duration of water flow in any showers

* Minimising the use of water in WCs

* Using old style waterless urinals

* re-using grey water from showers and other washing to flow through urinals or use to flush toilets (complicated by shampoos and soaps)

* using ‘nipples’ rather than taps for hand washing

* Reducing the use of detergents and chemicals on-site so water can be recycled or resued. Grey water that is full of shampoo cannot really be used to flush and also cannot be dealt with by organic composting methods

* Try and use eco-friendly detergents for washing kitchen utensils and avoid contamination with fats and oils.

*  Avoid other contaminants in waste water

*  A central system for heating water is often very efficient

Jans explained that in Germany there were particular problems as regulations meant that any water that humans used had to be ‘drinking’ quality water for everything on-site – very wasteful. The same seems to apply in the UK.  Jans suggests that a far better systems is to have two ‘pipes’ for water – one for clean drinking water and one for grey water that can be re-used on-site.

Jans also pointed out that transporting water and waste means that there are additional CO2 footprints for your festival!

Useful contacts:

Aqualogistiker (Germany) : www.aqualogistiker.de

Event Water Solutions (USA):  www.eventwatersolutions.com

WaterMills (UK): http://www.watermills.net/

Compost toilets:  www.naturalevent.co.uk and http://www.thunderboxes2go.co.uk/ 

Some friendy bottled waters : www.lifepurewater.com and www.belu.org and www.frankwater.com

The Green Events Germany website can be found at http://www.green-events-germany.eu/

Hadra and Grassroots spread the green message

 

Grassroots is a wonderful one day festival set in Val de Mare, Jersey. After a journey to the event by train, ferry and shuttle we were instantly struck by the lack of any rubbish on the floor. Grassroots commitment to reducing waste and keeping their site clean, as well as responsibly disposing of what is wasted is excellent. They had a reward scheme which was particularly utilized by the children where a full bucket of recyclable plastic bottles and cans could be exchanged for drinks tokens. They had only one local catering company and required them to use compostable packaging for any food containers. The initiative I was most impressed by is something I’ve been championing over the past year since hearing a similar scheme at Bonnarroo festival in Texas. There was no bottled water sold on site. There were refillable bottles sold for £1 and water filling stations around the site. This was facilitated by Jersey Water, and every pound collected went to charity Water Aid. This is hugely commendable on the part of the organizers who have foregone income from water sales for the sake of the environment and care for our finite resources. Organisers Allez-Oop are also informing the council of where Jersey infrastructure could be improved to assist with responsible waste management, for example provisions for industrial composting.

The Fourth edition of the Hadra Trance Festival took place in Lans-de-Vercour, French Alps this summer. Usually used as a ski resort, power was taken from the mains supply, whilst a number of traders brought solar power with them. Personal generators were banned at the event. The festival implemented a successful re-usable cup deposit scheme using “Ecocup” at the bars, and provided free re-usable butt bins in conjunction with sponsor “Green Addict”. Shuttles were provided from Grenoble train / coach station and free shuttles from Lans-de-Vercour to the festival site, and car share was promoted using covoiturage.fr, VFD, Jaspir and transiere.fr. Many bins for seperation of waste were provided by AREMACS and the Community of the Councils of Massifs of Vercours. Whilst the festival separated compost waste at present the location does not have the facility for food composting, only green composting (trees / plants etc). The site is a location of nature and beauty, and the message to protect this was widely communicated to the audience on website, flyers, posters, tickets, programmes and stalls.

Green Phoenix cancelled

The organisers of the Green Phoenix Festival organisers have taken the decision to cancel the festival planned for 19-22 August at Gibside National Trust Estate. Organisers took the decision due to insufficient advance ticket sales, and had no option but to cancel the festival, in order to be able to refund public tickets and deposits from traders.

Festival director Jim Lepingwell said: “We recognize that purchasers may have been waiting to buy tickets on the gates, but we could not professionally take the risk to allow suppliers and traders to set up and artists to travel to us without guaranteeing them an audience. Over the past few months we have taken every step possible to ensure that the festival could go ahead. We are devastated to be cancelling the festival, however we felt it was responsible to do it at this stage so we can completely refund the tickets and deposits. Had we started the set up of the festival as planned for Monday, we would have incurred considerable costs. As it is, all the ticket money and deposits are safeguarded and we are able to completely refund ticket-holders and traders. We want to thank everyone who has supported us this year and the team who have worked very hard to put together the amazing event we had planned.”

Organisers hope to find a way to make some of the music and events happen as smaller events and will let people know as soon as these are confirmed.  Please see www.greenphoenixfestival.org.uk

Sun, Sweat & Charity – a Glastonbury Tale

Here’s a link to the Community Channel’s new programme that looks at the charities and volunteers that are so important at the Glastonbury Festival  - and why the Festival is so important to them. Featuring WaterAid, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Shelter, The Festival’s world famous Green Police, the festival’s radio station Worthy FM, The White Ribbon Alliance, The National Trust, the on-site medical team – Billy Bragg and Michael Eavis! It shows just what a Festival can do to promote messages at an event – here a range of different charities promoting sustainability, safe child birth, access to water and climate change amongst others! 

http://www.youtube.com/v/ojgpgbJvZ38&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0

and http://www.communitychannel.org/content/view/3733/75/