From encouraging bike riding and compostable plates to better recycling, organisers have diverted 98% of waste from landfill – and they want to do more

For all the good vibes and communal spirit, when it comes to environmental sustainability there isn’t a great deal to celebrate about the average music festival.

As anyone who has gazed upon the aftermath of one can attest, these orgies of consumption typically leave in their wake a trail of plastic cups and dumped tents strewn about a wasteland of churned earth.

And that’s just the visible impact – there are also the carbon emissions of transporting stage infrastructure, performers, crew and of course fans to the festival site, not to mention the ravenous energy consumption of gigantic light and sound systems often powered by dirty diesel generators.

In Australia festivals have been working to clean up their act, from Melbourne’s Off the Grid capitalising on the solar power of the summer solstice, to the Byron Bay Surf festival banning plastic, to Victoria’s Meredith music festival doing the impossible and creating good out of a festival toilet by using human waste for compost.

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One of the pacesetters for decades has been the Adelaide leg of Womad (World of Music and Dance), which at the weekend marked its 25th anniversary by inching closer to the realisation of the festival director Ian Scobie’s dream party – one without the environmental hangover.

Womadelaide has launched a medley of initiatives to mitigate the harm it inflicts, from incentivising patrons to arrive by bike, to converting food packaging waste into compost that helps to restore the festival’s Botanic Park site, to donating $2 of each ticket sale to the planting of 70,000 native trees that have offset 16,250 tonnes of carbon emissions.

Scobie jokes that the only way the event could reduce its environmental impact further would be to cancel it completely.

Well?

“OK, I was being facetious,” he says. “Look, we’ve had artists say they aren’t going to fly and are just going to distribute music by streaming via the internet. It is a legitimate position to take. Our view though is there is much more positive that can come out of this festival providing a platform for discussion of the environment. Like any artistic enterprise, it draws people into the moment to think about a particular issue.”

The most obvious example of Scobie’s thinking is in Womadelaide’s the Planet Talks, which this year featured Sir Tim Smit discussing his co-creation of the Eden Project, as well as a panel discussing personal action that can be taken on climate change. In a concerning sign that perhaps the environmental message isn’t cutting through, festival organisers also felt the need to invite Nasa scientist Carmel Johnston to speak about the possibility of colonising Mars to safeguard humanity from extinction on Earth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adelaide Green Clean and the University of South Australia collaborated on a study to reduce waste going to landfill at the festival. Photograph: Max Opray/The Guardian

Beyond the talks, there are less overt behaviour-changing initiatives – Scobie thinks even the verdant emerald green setting of Botanic Park in itself makes people more eco-conscious.

“People care because it is a beautiful setting,” he says. “If it is in a bitumen car park it is a difficult task to win people over to looking after the site, but it is not a tough sell here.”

Another behaviour-changing achievement he touts is from the early years of Womadelaide, when the festival introduced unfamiliar yellow-topped recycling bins that had yet to be rolled out by local councils on to Adelaide’s suburban kerbsides. And today Womad is working to improve recycling bins – in 2015 Adelaide Green Clean was brought onboard to further reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill. The company collaborated with a University of South Australia study that filmed bin users and studied their responses to various types of bin signage, applying the findings to bin design and layout.

Just as people read from left to right, they consider where to dispose of waste in that order as well. Adelaide Green Clean determined which direction foot traffic was likely to go and placed organic bins on the left, recycling in the middle and general waste to the right to encourage that as a last resort. The company changed the wording on the bins – for instance “landfill” instead of “general waste” – and covered them in brighter colours associated with particular types of rubbish.

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Womad already required that traders use compostable cutlery and plates, but Adelaide Green Clean investigated the entire supply chain of those operating at Womad to ensure all food packaging could be turned into compost. Its managing director, Jordan Walsh, says the high expectations of sustainability at Womadelaide enabled his company to push further than it ever had before, and it is now rolling out what it has learned at hundreds of other events.

“There are over 700 bins on site and the logistics are crazy, so if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere in Adelaide,” he says.

For the 2016 festival, 98% of waste was diverted from landfill, and organisers are pushing for more.

Adelaide Green Clean has extended its arrangement with Womadelaide to continue until 2021, and Walsh says he has a plan to get the festival even closer to zero landfill.

“That 2% is mostly nappies, so next year we’re looking at possibly giving out boxes of compostable nappies so they can avoid landfill,” he says.