As part of an initiative by the city of Oulu called “The Most Sustainable European Capital of Culture”, we partnered with Solstice Festival to come up with ways to recycle the festival’s waste, as well as make construction and art materials from different local waste streams. The wider goal of the initiative is to make events in the Northern Ostrhobothnia region of Finland as carbon neutral as possible. Read more about the project at the City of Oulu website.
These two videos sum up the project in a nutshell. Keep reading to see the different things we have tried over the last few years.
2022 Edition
We started by creating two recycling stations for the second edition of the festival held on top of Ruka fell in Northern Finland. The recycling bins aimed to make recycling fun and rewarding, by occasionally dispensing a drink token to a lucky winner. The bins were made in collaboration with Mandin Collective, Copeau by Louis and RPSD. Thank you FabLab RUC for allowing us to use your facilities for making the token dispenser mechanism and Kääpä Biotech for providing us with some reishi antlers for the organic waste bin.
For reducing cigarette butt litter, around 500 empty film canisters were collected from film studios around Helsinki and given to festival goers to be used as pocket ashtrays. We also created three ‘voting ashtrays’. The bins and voting ashtrays were almost entirely made of reclaimed wood, plastic and metal sourced from a waste dump in the nearest city, Kuusamo. Overall the bins repurposed around 260 kg wood, 10 kg plastic and 2 kg metal from the waste site.
Making materials from waste
More than half of the festival weekend's plastic and bioplastic waste came from PLA drink cups (around 12% of total waste). PLA is tricky because despite being advertised as a bioplastic it often ends up with plastic waste and requires a special facility to biodegrade.
We took all the plastic and bioplastic collected by the recycling bins (around 12 kg) to our studio in Helsinki. After sorting out and cleaning all the different types of plastic, we used a shredder made by RPSD and FabLac RUC to help us process them into raw materials for next year’s festival. The shredded PLA drink cups were dyed using using spices, local berries and food dyes, and melted into sample tiles. Translucent sheets of the material could, for example, be used to create light installations. With the help of a plastic extruder made by RPSD in collaboration with Atelier des recycleurs fous, we also explored techniques of repurposing discarded plastic components from companies such as Pipelife and Nordic Laboratories. Plastic could be recycled to create construction materials for stages, shelters and hangout areas, as well as signs, artworks, small festival merchandise products or more recycling bins. Lots more experimentation to come!
We also experimented with a few locally found organic materials. During the festival weekend, the festival site generated around 4 kg of paper and carton in the form of coffee cups and soup bowls, which was turned into sample tiles and bricks. We also experimented using woodworkers’ sawdust, sea buckthorn skins from Aromtech, mycelium and natural dyes to create a range of biodegradable materials.
Such biomaterials could for example be used to create temporary construction materials, signs and ephemeral artworks, designed to last only for the days of the festival. Afterwards they could be composted locally or reprocessed into new raw materials.
This experiment with Solstice Festival and Oulu opened up interesting avenues for future development. We look forward to working with Solstice and creating something from these materials for next year’s midsummer celebration, held on top of the magical Ruka peak in Northern Finland.
