Festivals have the unique ability to gather people with shared cultural values. However, while culturally enriching, they typically produce tremendous amounts of waste. Sustainable event management requires particular strategies in order to prevent and reduce waste and to facilitate the recovery of potentially valuable waste resources. Festivals offer a test bed for new models of resource recovery, and where sustainability-in-action can be publicly demonstrated. By using approaches from design for sustainability, this project aims to design a new waste- system for festivals: to build waste-awareness; engender environmentally friendly behaviours, and put to work the waste of festivals as key inputs to identify festival requirements. Event organisers can dramatically improve the waste system management by incorporating new recycling strategies that deliver pro-sustainability messages to event attendees, staff, and volunteers that translate notions of stewardship beyond the festival and into everyday practices.

Recovering festival waste in large quantities demands specific material segregation strategies and weight to volume ratios to be economically and environmentally viable. This project provides a product-service-systems strategy mediated through the design of a festival waste pre-processing system product. Functioning as a ‘mouth’ and fitted to conventional wheelie-bins this product aims to segregate and crush non-organic recyclables such as plastic bottles and cans and to combine and shred organic waste, such as food and paper, in order to dramatically reduce its in- bin volume. This reduction of waste volume increases its weight and reduces the time and energy needed in transporting waste away from the festival directly to recyclers’. This bypasses the need for inefficient sorting in conventional MERF systems and reduces the likelihood of valuable commodity materials going to landfill. Using a simple mechanism to feed, shred, crush and dispose of recycling without much human effort, the project has a key focus on usability, safety, cost, performance, and reliability – critical to the demonstration of sustainability-in-action in a festival context.