For people who have ever experienced a festival, this is a familiar image: on the last day, everyone leaves the festival grounds with a massive hangover, and they don’t leave the field empty. Tents, sleeping bags and other rubbish are left behind. As a festival organisation, you often don’t have the manpower, money and technology to recycle this waste properly. Fortunately, there is Uppact. Their innovation, the UnWastor, recycles all plastic (as well as textile) waste. They turn this into high-quality, new and recyclable products, such as building materials. This way, the festival also benefits the following edition.

Among other things, Uppact investigated what customers’ expectations are, what product requirements customers have and whether the UnWastor can make them, and if the waste delivered is suitable for the UnWastor. During Lowlands 2022, Uppact collected a mountain of camping waste and brought it to their waste processing site in Eemshaven in Groningen. There, their UnWastor ground all the waste into liquid material, which they used to make beams to build picnic tables for Lowlands 2023. Circularity in optima format.

During the TT Festival in 2023, they investigated what waste remained, so that in 2024 they can collect the waste to make new products. Together with a student team, they observed how the waste was collected and how festival visitors handled their waste. One of their main findings was that the waste was not sorted. At the end of the test all findings were compiled in a report presented to all stakeholders involved.