Two of this year’s projects at Roskilde Festival address an ever-present topic, namely the huge amounts of waste produced by a temporary festival village with 130,000 inhabitants. Here, the waste will be measured and analysed, but also the festival-goers.
How much waste is actually thrown out, are people capable of sorting it, and what do you plan on doing with your Roskilde tent when the music fades out? These are some the questions which two of DTU’s projects at Roskilde Festival 2015 will seek to answer.
In the festival areas East and West, festival-goers will find two 18-square-metre sorting walls with holes for chairs, pavilions, tents, and beer cans. Here, everyone is expected to sort their waste, but they can also follow how much the other sorting station has thrown out, and thus compete to becoming Roskilde champion waste sorter.
“The whole idea is to make it easier and more fun for people to sort their waste, and with a recycling station in area East and another in area West, we are counting on people’s competitive spirit to get them on board,” explains Jonas Bager, one of the four students behind the project.
"At East, almost nothing was thrown out between Saturday and Monday, while the recycling station at West has been under considerable pressure."
Jonas Bager, DTU student.
“It’s been fascinating to observe how the two areas dispose of their respective waste. At East, almost nothing was thrown out between Saturday and Monday, while the recycling station at West has been under considerable pressure,” says Jonas Bager.
Possible through collaboration
Together with the sorting wall, the DTU team has developed a web app which makes it very easy for volunteers to count and register the waste on iPads.
“By using tablets and our web app, we can update the results immediately so that the festival-goers can keep track in real time,” says Jonas Bager.
The project has been developed in close collaboration with Roskilde Festival’s existing waste sorting station ReAct, who thought the project fitted in well with the festival concept.
“Working together has eased the workload a lot, and has been crucial for our voluntary contact so the project could be realized,” says Nana Rose-Broch, who has been in charge of the contact with the festival organizers.
When the festival is over, the team hopes to have amassed a completely new body of data so that waste sorting can be even better in future.
“This year we will have hard data for the first time on what people are throwing away and where it comes from, and hopefully this will give us an idea of how to improve communication and waste sorting next year,” says Jonas Bager.
Festival-goers analysed
However, it’s not just the waste which will be analysed at this year’s festival—it’s also the public’s attitude to recycling, specifically tents.
The environmental impact of the 50,000 tents or so that festival-goers bring with them to the festival will be analysed, as well as what they do with their tents once the festival is over.
The team behind the project—Natascha Østergaard, Laura Skovgaard Thorsted, Maria Tyrychtrova, and Signe Walther—will during the festival distribute approx. 200 questionnaires in which respondents will be asked what they plan to do with their tents once the festival is over. In addition, they have produced stickers with QR codes so visitors can complete the questionnaire online.
“Our project is primarily for analysis purposes, but also to show what environmental impact the tents would have if, for example, everyone at the festival gave them to charity, or if all the tents were produced by the festival. Hopefully, the findings can be used to change festival-goers’ attitudes and, at the end of the day, create a more sustainable event,” explain the four students.
Both projects will be running throughout Roskilde Festival, after which the teams can begin to analyse the results.