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Pee recycling. Biodegradable cutlery. Mapping waste flows. Cir-cu-la-ri-ty. It’s like the folks at electronic music festival DGTL know exactly what to say to get sustainability groupies like us excited. Since its first edition in 2013, the Dutch organisers behind the global event have been steadily working towards becoming the world’s first circular music festival. And yes, that includes turning your pee back into drinking water. Cheers.
DGTL combines a love for phenomenal line-ups with a love for our planet. From the beginning, the team aimed to not only limit the festival’s environmental impact, but to leave the world better than they found it. To achieve that, they continuously research, pilot and implement innovative measures that can reduce waste and emissions. Measures like – here we go – processing festival goers’ urine into drinking water.
“Water plays a huge role at our event. Our attendees and crew need to stay hydrated. That’s something we need to facilitate and pay close attention to - especially on sunny days. At the same time, fresh water is a limited resource that isn’t valued enough.”
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So, what do you do when you want to help manage humanity’s consumption of precious drinking water? Remove meat from your menu, for starters. And then you use your festival to start a pilot in which urine is collected and processed by a treatment system that filters out waste products. “The pilot has been running since 2018. We’re still experimenting, but the water already adheres to all the requirements for drinking water.”
How about that. Those of you bursting (ha, ha) to try will have to wait, since attendees aren’t allowed to drink it yet. In the meantime, it’s safely stored while DGTL continues to support the further development of the technique.
The circular sanitation system is part of the event’s ambitious ambition to become the world’s first circular music festival – an event where waste does not exist. That means moving away from the linear systems in which things are made, used and then thrown away, and instead focusing on reuse: turning all of DGTL’s waste into valuable resources.
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One of the big milestones in this process was finalising a Material Flow Analysis (MFA). The team mapped out all of the festival’s material and waste flows and used that data to prioritise focus areas to achieve a circular state. If that sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it was, says Mitchell. “It cost a lot of time and effort, but it’s absolutely worth it. Having the data allows us to report back to the management team and evaluate whether interventions are achieving what we aimed for.”
Recently, the sustainable music festival added another intervention to reduce its carbon footprint. As of 2021, a collaboration with SkyNRG means all performing artists who travel to the festival by plane, do so CO2-neutrally thanks to the use of biofuels (read: frying fat).
“SkyNRG’s fuel cuts carbon emissions by 85% compared to kerosine. By purchasing a little extra, our artists’ flights become 100% CO2-neutral.”
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2021 is set to be the year in which DGTL achieves its circularity goal. As inspiration for their next sustainability move, we not-so-subtly suggested banning single-use plastic water bottles from their festival. Because while the crew drinks tap water from reusable water bottles (go crew!), bottled water is on sale for festival goers.
“We offer 100% recycled PET bottles and have a deposit system in place that helps us collect and return 95% of them to the manufacturer for recycling”
Which is a great start. But as we spend our days at Dopper fighting single-use plastic water bottles, we’re always encouraging (read: friendly badgering) organisations to take the next step.
Because how cool would it be for DGTL to start a wave of change across the global festival scene by choosing reusable water bottles? Very cool indeed. We’re ready when they are.
Header photo by Jordy Brada Other photos by Kirsten van Santen