100 DTU students at Roskilde Festival

Once a year, Roskilde Festival becomes the fourth-largest city in Denmark with some 130,000 inhabitants. And as this city is meant to be built and taken down in a very short time, its presents a wide range of engineering challenges. For example how to ensure that the waste produced can be disposed of in the most sustainable manner, or how to reduce electricity and water consumption.

To meet the challenges, Roskilde Festival has since 2010 collaborated with DTU students on creating an even better and more sustainable festival.

So this year, about DTU 100 students will again contribute with a wide range of projects—from cooling, waste management, and acoustics, to a local smart grid which may some day make the festival independent of outside power. This means that festival-goers will meet DTU projects on the camping site, which will include tests with better signage and more efficient waste sorting.

During the festival, they will also have the chance to visit the DTU TechLab to hear students talk about their projects and, among other things, invite the audience to build their own climate-friendly refrigerator. All of these solutions are intended to further improve festival conditions and make it even greener.

"To make a city such as Roskilde Festival ever more sustainable is a continuous and huge project. Our collaboration with the DTU students helps us to locate the places where it makes most sense to make changes, and they come up with good ideas for how we can implement them," says Christina Bilde, spokesperson for Roskilde Festival.

"For example, last year's DTU project PeeFence was an excellent solution to our problem with people peeing around the fences, and we will continue this project at this year's festival. This way, the collaboration also helps young talents on the way. For example, we were very impressed with both the VOLT mobile charger and the sustainable DropBucket refuse solution, which both started as DTU projects. It is another aspect of this collaboration, which we are very proud of," she says.

The collaboration between Roskilde Festival and DTU has been running since 2010, and Martin Vigild, Dean of Graduate Studies and International Affairs at DTU, who was one of the organizers of the partnership, is very pleased that DTU students as part of their education have the opportunity to use Roskilde Festival as a laboratory for their bright ideas:

"At DTU, we focus on our students being innovative and entrepreneurial. This is, after all, what they will live off when they graduate. It is an engineer's primary task to be able to create solutions where there is a need—and doing it in close collaboration with a customer. Roskilde Festival is the perfect laboratory for our students, both because the surroundings make very high demands on their solutions, and because we over the years have had a very close dialogue with the festival, and because they actually use the students' ideas and results in their work," says Martin Vigild.