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Green Guardians: Resource management

The Green Guardians Guide, spearheaded by the Green Events and Innovations Conference and IQ Magazine, is a new yearly initiative highlighting some of the work being done around the world to reduce the carbon footprint of the live entertainment business.

The inaugural list, which originally ran in IQ 90, features 60 entries across ten categories, selected by the Green Guardians committee, which includes representatives from some of the sector’s most respected bodies, such as A Greener FestivalGo GroupGreen Music InitiativeJulie’s Bicycle and Vision:2025.

Following on from last week’s feature on the companies providing PR and marketing initiatives, this edition of Green Guardians looks at how to turn one man’s trash into another man’s treasure.

 


Resource management

Pitched for You
Both the circular economy and the mantra “cradle to cradle” (as opposed to “cradle to grave”) are what drive Pitched For You, which, in a nutshell, hires ready-pitched tents to festival fans.

During a trip to Africa, recycling fanatic Kieran vanden Bosch was inspired by how many things the local people reused and repurposed, and so on his return to the UK in 2008, he started Transition Resource as a Transition Town group based in Glastonbury.

Under that banner, he set about picking up rubbish and trying to make useful things out of it, in the hope of turning rubbish into resource by creating a need for it.

“I found a lot of tents left at festivals and started Camplight in 2012,” says the serial entrepreneur. “I soon realised Camplight could never actually fully change the problem at large, so that’s why I’ve started Pitched for You, which I’m now trying to find funding for.”

During a trip to Africa, Kieran vanden Bosch was inspired by how many things the local people reused and repurposed

Mepex
Mepex is a Norwegian consulting company that specialises in waste management and recycling. With almost 30 years of experience, Mepex has acquired a unique knowledge base.

Combined with a solid international network and good digital tools, it ensures its clients’ resource-efficient solutions enable them to achieve their environmental goals.

Mepex has a long list of ongoing and completed assignments for both the public and private sectors. It is an independent company run by partners and has 16 employees, located in the centre of Asker.

Those employees have a solid knowledge base and extensive expertise in the fields of waste management and recycling, allowing Mepex to embark on projects for different types of client groups, throughout the waste pyramid – and along the entire value chain for all types of products and materials.

With a strong background in waste management and recycling, Mepex offers a vast array of services including analyses; strategies and measures; implementation; and new circular concepts.

Mepex ensures its clients’ resource-efficient solutions enable them to achieve their environmental goals

Grist Environmental
For those organising a public or private event, Devizes, UK-based Grist Environmental can ensure that it is clean, safe and environmentally responsible.

The company’s specialist event services team is experienced, flexible and unobtrusive. It ensures that all waste is recycled and recovered from events at its specialist materials recovery facility, resulting in zero waste going to landfill.

Grist’s employees regularly manage waste solutions at events ranging from 30,000 revellers at a week-long festival to village fetes for a few hundred people at local, regional and national levels.

From the set-up to the breakdown of an event, the company can provide experienced and committed staff as well as flexible and reliable equipment hire. This ensures excellent customer satisfaction and site cleanliness for the duration.

Supplying a wide range of high-quality, customer-focused waste management packages, Grist’s services are tailored to meet specific client needs and can include everything from litter picking teams and corporate hospitality staff, to portable event toilets and fencing and crowd control barriers.

Grist’s services include litter picking teams, corporate hospitality staff, portable event toilets, fencing and crowd control

Tutaka
Describing itself as a “go-to source for sustainable hospitality,” Tutaka makes sustainable procurement easy by relieving buyers from the hotel, restaurant and event industry of the complex task of searching.

“In our marketplace, numerous audited products and services can be directly acquired. This saves time and brings products into the operations that inspire guests and employees alike,” it states.

The Tutaka platform features such varied products as upcycled, PET, hotel slippers, soap dispensers, aprons from recycled PET, edible spoons, straws made from straw and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has even sourced ranges of sustainable face masks.

For events and festival organisers, Hamburg-based Tutaka carries links for items such as F&B tokens made from wood cut-offs, organic cotton festival bracelets, recycled polyester wristbands and rentable lanyards.

On a larger scale, it brokers deals for the likes of sustainable festival toilet blocks, solar phone-charging stations, cardboard trash-cans and even cardboard tents.

The Tutaka platform features products such as edible spoons, straws made from straw, and even sustainable face masks

Ecofest
Ecofest is a Belgian, not-for-profit organisation that is constantly searching for more sustainable solutions for the event sector. It combines knowledge of circularity and sustainability with hands-on waste management at events.

Ecofest supports event organisers in its implementation of green measures by analysing the current situation, presenting a trajectory of solutions, and making the link between organisation and potential suppliers.

While Ecofest specialises in working with reusable cups and waste sorting, it also investigates possibilities within the whole range of environmental issues – waste, energy, catering, mobility, etc. The organisation’s aim is to raise awareness and change the behaviour of event visitors, organisers and suppliers.

It shares its practical experience through workshops, lectures and “how to” documents. To date, Ecofest has worked with several Belgian festivals, dance events and local authorities including the City of Antwerp and the Flemish waste administration, OVAM.

The organisation’s aim is to raise awareness and change the behaviour of event visitors, organisers and suppliers

Green Box Events
Based in Bristol, UK, waste and recycling specialist Greenbox offers a unique and forward-thinking approach to events waste management. It pioneers the most sustainable strategies whilst keeping events clean, tidy and safe.

The Greenbox team builds on a wealth of experience that dates back to the mid-90s when recycling was first taking a foothold in the events industry. Its specially designed, distinctive and robust recycling stations are renowned for their ease of use and high recycling yield.

The company maintains that it’s what you don’t see that’s most important; through strategic deployment of its teams, Greenbox tackles cleansing issues before they become a problem.

Greenbox operates throughout the UK, frequently in remote areas with limited and difficult access, as well as busy city centres and at high-profile sporting events.

It provides all the necessary vehicles, personnel, equipment and expertise to ensure events are cleaned efficiently, professionally and more sustainably.

The company maintains that it’s what you don’t see that’s most important

Festovers
Festovers’ ethos is to look at all avenues to create a circular economy, which currently translates as upcycling for reuse. Environmentalism has been at the core of Festovers from the start, as the whole idea involves trying to create a more sustainable festival/ events industry.

Festovers’ main work in 2019 was with Truck Festival in Oxfordshire where it managed to collect over 85% of the leftover tents, all to be upcycled.

Every year, more than 95% of leftover festival tents end up in landfill/incinerators. Festovers wants to work with major festivals across the sector to massively reduce that number.

Thanks to Festovers’ hard work, festivals can make a massive dent in their waste. With a good social media presence, the company is also offering a positive impact to the audience, as it educates about tent waste and tries to encourage people to take their tents home.

Festovers founder Thomas Panton says, “Don’t be afraid to make a big change. The future needs big changes, and sometimes leading the way is the best thing an event/ festival or even an individual can do.”

 


Continue reading this feature in the digital edition of IQ 90, or subscribe to the magazine here

 


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