Strategy for sustainability

NorthSide is a relatively new music festival out of Aarhus, Denmark. The festival is based on three core values: Innovation, user involvement and sustainability. With one of their core values as sustainability, the festival contacted us to help them answer the big question: How does a music festival and sustainability go hand in hand?

What we did and how it turned out?
We have made a strategic tool for the festival in the work with a more sustainable profile. This tool is a model that the festival management use to take decisions. In short it’s about thinking triple bottom line into everything, from beginning to ending.

In this regard, the festival aims to sell only organic food, there’s bike repairing at the bike parking lot at the festival site (no guests drives a car to the festival), all advertising materials such as poster and flyers were made on the Cradle certified Stonepaper and merchandise were made on organic shirts.

Waste handling is another great example. A large scale event as a festival produces massive waste quantities. If it’s all thrown down the same big container in one big hotchpotch, it’s an expense and all the resources are burned (in Denmark we burn stuff). If on the other hand the waste is sorted, you will find that the resources are not only recycled, it also becomes an income for the festival. One question though… How do we make 20.000 young drunk people sort their waste?

Pictures: Northside Festival