Festival brings together a ‘Fusion’ of plastics recycling and music
Close to 10,000 plastic bottles were collected and recycled from one of the UK’s leading music festivals earlier this month in a drive to promote recycling outside of the home.
The initiative was a collaboration between soft drinks company, Britvic, the company behind brands such as Robinsons, J2O, Tango and Pepsi Max, and recycling association, RECOUP, and was designed to encourage festival goers to recycle their empty plastic drinks bottles at the 2016 Fusion Festival.
RECOUP installed a network of plastics recycling units across the festival site, as well as arranging for the sorting and reprocessing of the material at the end of the event.
The gift of recycling
Festival-goers were encouraged to recycle by being offered a gift bag made from three recycled PET bottles containing environmentally-friendly essential festival items. They were also given the opportunity to win a festival VIP ticket by answering a plastics recycling-based question.
The emphasis was to create highly visible messaging at each of the recycling points where the RECOUP recycling team were also able to engage with the consumers on a one-to-one basis and encourage positive recycling behaviour change.
The Fusion Festival Manager, Charlie Lock, commented that “encouraging our visitors to recycle in the units provided has the added benefit of reducing litter on site and makes the festival experience a much cleaner, and more environmentally friendly one for everybody”.
Sustainable programme
RECOUP says it would like to see effective and practical resource management plans in place for all music sports and entertainment events and is planning to work with brand owners and events organisers to implement further future plans.
Commenting on its partnership with RECOUP, Lauretta Lamont, CSR Manager, Britvic, said: “Packaging is an essential component of our products and making best use of this resource is an important focus for us and our Sustainable Business programme, as it is for our customers like Fusion.
“The partnership with RECOUP has successfully promoted the importance of recycling, encouraging consumers to recycle their empty bottles to ensure a clean, green festival event and experience for everyone.”
Anne Hitch, RECOUP Communications Manager, said the partnership was a “fantastic opportunity” to be able to engage with festival-goers and re-enforce the plastics recycling message.
“It is great that we have been able to work with Britvic again to help reduce the volume of waste normally sent to landfill from out of home consumption,” she concluded.