Cooking Oil As Fuel & Coffee Grounds For Soap Bars: Greenest Festivals Honored At ILMC

AMMP/Bogdan Maran – A Greener Festival Award 2020:
All Winners

As is tradition, the Green Events & Innovations Conference took place on the first day of ILMC 2020, March 3 – a day topped off with the the Greener Festival Award ceremony for festivals that excel in terms of protecting the environment.

Cambridge Folk Festival won the Greener Transport Award. The 14,000-capacity event provides a free local bus pass and large bike parks to visitors. Surveys conducted by the festival’s organizers show a steady decrease in car use over the years.

AMMP/Bogdan Maran – Green Events & Innovation Conference 2020
IQ Magazine’s Gordon Masson moderated “A Greener Tour” panel with Rebecca Travis (RT Tour Management) Emma Banks (CAA) Tanner Watt (Reverb) Patricia Yagüe (Live Nation) and Coralie Berael (Forest National Arena)

Cambridge Folk Festival staff are mostly local or stay on site and contractors transport was reduced a further 12.5% in 2019. Artists ground transport emissions were reduced by 30% due to fewer journeys, as the event communicates with the artist about balancing travel impacts and measures mileage and emissions.

This year’s edition is welcomes Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Passenger, Seasick Steve, Suzanne Vega, Martha Wainwright and many more this year, when it takes place July 30–Aug. 2 at Cherry Hinton Hall, Cambridge.

The Greener Catering Award went to DGTL Festival Amsterdam, a 20,000-cap, two-day non-camping electronic city festival. DGTL are champions of the co-called Circular Food Court, where all caterers are obliged to buy surplus and imperfect food as much as they can.

The menu is dictated by the residual flows of ingredients available, all meals served are vegetarian. DGTL Festival also provides a visual representation of food impacts on audiences to help raise awareness of eating habits and choices.

For the second year running the Greener Power Award went to the pioneers of The Green Gathering, a festival run entirely on renewable energy, solar energy plus sometimes a little wind or cycle power. All campsites, campervan areas, the medical tent, water pump and production areas are operated off-grid and powered renewably. There’s no bio-diesel used anywheere. A small solar rig powers the public Box Office, the carparks are powered by solar tower lights.

The Green Gathering empowers participants to realize the possibilities of living off-grid themselves.

Greenbelt Festival, a 9,000-cap camping festival in the UK launched in 1974, won the Community Action Award. The International Greener Festival Award jury said the festival “is exemplary in its social impacts and positive external reach, through its festival policies, the line-up, and the traders that it welcomes.”

Greenbelt for example supports local businesses by purchasing food from local suppliers and furniture from local charity shops. Festivalgoers donate thousands of pounds worth of food each year to the local food bank.

Greenbelt has achieved the gold standard from UK accessibility group Attitude is Everything, and pro-actively books and profiles LGBTQ artists. Each year, the off-stage lineup includes workshops and talks on topics of social inclusion, peace and environmental balance, which are also made available online.

Thailand’s Wonderfruit festival won the Greener Creative Award for its décor, which is made up almost entirely of natural materials, using rope in place of nails. “You would be a very hard stretched to find a plastic cable tie on this site,” the jurors wrote.

Wonderfruit works with architects on the design of ts structures, and uses a large storage space and containers to store materials to be used year after year.

This year’s Water & Sanitation Award went to Strawberry Fields, which has 100% composting toilets, reuses water for its dishwashing program as well as the watering of natives and vegetation in the permaculture gardens during the build. Showers are few in numbers and limited in the hours of operation.

Sziget in Budapest, Hungary, one of Europe’s largest festivals, introduced a mobile composting system this year, where cutlery, plates and food waste were collected, ground-up on-site, and composted. The compost is being used to recultivate the Óbuda Island, on which the festival takes place.

The system, which will be expanded in 2020, earned Sziget the Greener Innovation Award.

AMMP/Bogdan Maran – Greener Festival Award 2020
Oya Festival took home the International Greener Festival Award 2020. From left: host Ben Challis, ØYA’s Mia Frogner and A Greener Festival’s Claire O’Neill.

The Pied Piper Award, handed out for an event’s communication, went to We Love Green, which not only host debates, talks and workshops around sustainability at the event, but continues the interaction with audiences online and throughout the year in order to raise awareness and inspire action around social and environmental topics.

Furthermore, We Love Green instigated the s-called Green Europe Experience (GEX), a collaboration between six European partners with the support of Creative Europe, to tackle scenography at and food sustainability of live events. We Love Green are also an active part of the Green Deal Circular Festivals collaboration between fellow festival organisers from all over Europe.

Øya Festival from Oslo, Norway, is regularly awarded at the Greener Festival Awards. It has been committed to protecting the environment since 2002. The festival won two awards this year, including the International Greener Festival Award, which goes to the event with the highest overall scoring each year – to be considered for an award, festivals must undergo a detailed assessment, a site visit, and analysis as part of the evidence-based Greener Festival Award scheme.

The 18,000-capacity Øya also won the Circular Festival Award for reduced waste & resourcefulness on site. Most of the festival’s signage and decor is reused each year, it hands out reusable cups and provides volunteers and crew with refillable bottles.

Materials that are not reused are meticulously sorted and separated into 15 fractions for recycling. Used cooking oil from caterers is used as fuel in a tour van, coffee grinds are used by a local business to us in bars of soap, the heat from the sewage works process is used to warm buildings in Oslo.

A Greener Festival is also the name of the organization handing out the award. Founded in 2007, AGF has assessed over 600 festivals worldwide.