Good music and green initiatives. Increased sustainability is an important global agenda and also a key focus for a lot of Danish music festivals.
For many Danes, the highlight of the year is the festival season. This might explain why Denmark is the country in the world with the highest amount of music festivals per inhabitant. In recent years, an increased number of festivals have put sustainability top of their agenda and initiated a wide variety of actions. Therefore, the Danish music festivals houses a lot of interesting examples of green innovative initiatives and sustainable solutions.
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“Sustainable development and change must be made in collaboration and developed in partnerships across industries and sectors. A collaboration with The Confederation of Danish Industry gives us the opportunity to take our work towards a circular festival to new heights and thereby make an even bigger mark on the world”
Roskilde Festival as a laboratory for sustainability
Roskilde Festival is the largest music and arts festival in Northern Europe dating back to 1971. Every year Roskilde Festival transforms an empty field into a festival city with approximately 130,000 people, which turns it into one of the biggest cities in Denmark in the duration of the festival. This makes Roskilde Festival a perfect lab for testing new ideas within areas such as sustainability, social inclusion, and green energy solutions.
Roskilde Festival collaborate with several partners before, during, and after the festival. A recently launched partnership is with The Confederation of Danish Industry (Dansk Industri), where the collaboration has begun with a joint effort in relation to EU’s New European Bauhaus project. The purpose is examining new ways of creating circular and sustainable societies, using culture as a social catalyst for behavioral change.
It is a complex problem to transform urban areas into sustainable, inclusive, and aesthetic cities and this cooperation is expected to result in putting forward solutions and conclusions from the ‘Roskilde Festival lab’ and into the work on future cities.
The goal is to gain inspiration from the initiatives that can inspire NewEuropean Bauhaus projects with tests and results from new solutions that ultimately leads to action and establishing a common platform for urban development and circular events.
Furthermore, the partners have initiated a short-term explorative involvement for the “well-being economy”. This project looks at how to build an economy that operates with safe environmental limits and serves the collective well-being of current and future generations.
”Roskilde Festival’s temporary and high population density makes the festival city a distinctive laboratory in regard to innovative urban planning and will be able to inspire New European Bauhaus projects with current tests of new solutions”
Plant-based food and reducing energy consumption at NorthSide festival
The Danish festivals take different approaches and actions to sustainability when it comes to supporting a green transition.
NorthSide festival in Aarhus releases a yearly sustainability report that measures the results of their strategy to decrease their CO2 footprint as much as possible every year. In 2022 they managed to decrease their CO2 emissions with 30% compared to the festival prior, despite having an increased number of guests. NorthSide points at two initiatives that especially made a positive impact: solely serving plant-based food and getting electrical needs covered by electricity from the common electricity grid instead of diesel-powered generators.
Meat and other animal-based products are the foods that have the largest climate footprint, and Denmark is among the countries that have the highest consumption of meat per inhabitant*. NorthSide was the first Danish festival to go plant-based and the meat-free menu at the festival resulted in a 32% CO2 reduction per person per day.
By changing electricity outlet, NorthSide also saw an impressive 82% reduction in emissions from their energy consumption. This proves the significant impact that concrete sustainability measures can have and NorthSide continues to implement new initiatives that makes the festival greener.
Social sustainability on the agenda at Copenhell
Sustainability has also been on the agenda for the heavy metal festival Copenhell for many years. With solutions such as collecting coffee grounds for mushroom production, water reducing vacuum toilets, waste sorting etc., the festival is actively pursuing green initiatives. In 2022, the festival had a key focus on data collection, to better form a basis for concrete efforts going forward.
Copenhell also looks beyond green initiatives and includes social sustainability in their efforts. The festival works with initiatives supporting socially vulnerable individuals, contributing to diversity and representation at the festival and within the music genres they work with, and local initiatives that contribute positively to the city of Copenhagen.
Local products and sustainable partnerships at Heartland
At Heartland festival on the island of Funen, they aim to follow the global commitments agreed upon in the Paris Agreement and set concrete and quantifiable ambitions. By 2026, the festival aims to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% compared to their 2019 level, by implementing a number of sustainability measures.
One of the measures is an increased focus on purchasing local products from Funen. 80-90% of all ingredients for the food at Heartland comes from Funen and even international restaurants that caters at the festival are expected to source their ingredients locally**. This limits the transportation of goods and services, and it also strengthens the local economy and community.
Another initiative Heartland is making is sustainable partnerships. By 2024, their goal is that 100% of their partnerships will focus on sustainability. They will work closely with the industry to share both positive and negative experiences with the change they’re implementing, making it easier to learn and develop together.
Music festivals for increased quality of life
This is just a small selection of examples on all the incredible sustainable initiatives happening at Danish music festivals. However, they showcase that music festivals are a great place to test and initiate sustainable solutions that can be implemented on a larger scale and consequently have an impact on the sustainable cities created in the future.
The sustainable actions at the Danish music festivals shows a big desire to not only deliver great musical experiences, but also contribute to a greener future that increases quality of life. It is well known that music can evoke joy and reduce stress and studies show that communal music experiences, like going to a music festival, leads to increased levels of overall satisfaction in life***. Perhaps, the vast amount of Danish music festivals are a contributing factor to Danes being among the happiest people in the world? We will never know for sure, but we will happily continue to test the thesis.
* https://concito.dk/files/dokumenter/artikler/klimavenlig_kost.pdf
*** https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305735616659552
