Since 2022, we have been working with Solstice Festival held in Northern Finland, to come up with ways to collect, sort out and recycle the festival’s waste and turn it into new construction and art materials for future editions of the festival. The project is supported by an initiative by the city of Oulu, “The Most Sustainable European Capital of Culture”. The wider goal of the initiative is to make events in the Northern Ostrhobothnia region of Finland as carbon neutral as possible.
Our team has so far built 18 recycling containers scattered across the festival, made entirely from reclaimed wood collected at the waste site at Kuusamo, the nearest city. At the end of the festival, we opened up all the trash bags, sorted whatever materials could be saved for recycling, and weighed all the materials.
Data graphics by Tania Marléchauffé
The Afterlife of Waste
Displosable drink cups made of PLA was a key waste stream that we decided to tap into for material exploration. PLA is tricky because despite being advertised as a bioplastic it often ends up with plastic waste and requires a special facility to biodegrade. At the 2023 festival, we collected 32 kg of PLA, an equivalent to around 6400 disposable shot or wine cups.
For the 2023 festival, we experimented with ways of making translucent tiles out of drink cups collected at the 2022 festival. The PLA drink cups were first washed by hand, turned into granules using a shredder from Bloft Design Lab, and dyed using using spices, berries and food dyes. The raw material was then extruded into a mold using a plastic extruder made by RPSD in collaboration with Atelier des recycleurs fous, and pressed into a tile.
In 2023 the tiles were used to decorate a midsummer pole — a traditional element at midsummer celebrations. Thank you our interns and collaborators Mattia Anderle, Lova Norgren, Radul Radulovic, RPSD with help in different parts of the process.
Bagasse food containers collected at the 2023 festival. 11 kg = around 450-660 trays.
These two videos sum up the project in a nutshell. Keep scrolling to see other things we have tried over the last couple of years.
Experiment Archive - 2022
At the 2022 festival, our recycling stations were made interactive, to make recycling more fun and rewarding. Each time a piece of rubbish was brought for recycling, a little mechanism would tick inside the bin and occasionally bring out a lucky drink token. We learnt that it was a fun addition but did not really encourage people to recycle more. The bins were made in collaboration with Mandin Collective, Copeau by Louis and RPSD. The mechanisms components were machined at FabLab RUC.
For reducing cigarette butt litter, empty film canisters were collected from film studios around Helsinki and given to festival goers to be used as pocket ashtrays. We also built ‘voting ashtrays’.
Plastic & biomaterial experiments
To learn about working with recycled plastic, we experimented with some of the 2022 festival’s plastic waste, as well as waste from companies Pipelife and Nordic Laboratories.
We also experimented making tiles and bricks out of carton coffee cups and soup bowls from the 2022 festival. Woodworkers’ sawdust, sea buckthorn skins from Aromtech, mycelium and natural dyes were also explored as ingredients for biodegradable and ephemeral materials for the event industry.
Complete project reports for 2022 and 2023 (in Finnish) are available on request.
Project funded by:
Parts of the project have also been funded by:
