UK’s Fusion Festival encourages recycling

Soft drinks company Britvic, which makes brands such as Robinsons, J2O, Tango and Pepsi Max, teamed up with U.K.-based RECOUP to encourage attendees of the 2016 Fusion Festival, held in Liverpool, to recycle their empty plastic drinks bottles.

RECOUP installed a network of plastics recycling units across the festival site and arranged for the sorting and reprocessing of the material at the end of the event. Festival goers were encouraged to recycle by being offered a gift bag made from three recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles containing environmentally friendly essential festival items. They also were given the opportunity to win a festival Golden Circle ticket by answering a plastics recycling question.  

Anne Hitch, RECOUP communications manager, says, “This was a fantastic opportunity to be able to engage with festival goers and re-enforce the plastics recycling message. It is great that we have been able to work with Britvic again to help reduce the volume of waste normally sent to landfill from out of home consumption.”

RECOUP says it was able to arrange for nearly 10,000 plastic bottles to be recycled, saving the equivalent of nearly half a tonne of carbon.

Lauretta Lamont, CSR manager, Britvic, says, “Packaging is an essential component of our products, and making best use of this resource is an important focus for us and our Sustainable Business programme, as it is for our customers like Fusion.

“The partnership with RECOUP has promoted the importance of recycling, encouraging consumers to recycle their empty bottles to ensure a clean, green festival event and experience for everyone,” she adds.

The emphasis was to create highly visible messaging at each of the recycling points where the RECOUP recycling team also was able to engage with the consumers on a one-to-one basis and encourage positive recycling behaviour change.

Fusion Festival Manager Charlie Lock says, “Encouraging our visitors to recycle in the units provided has the added benefit of reducing litter on-site and makes the festival experience a much cleaner and more environmentally friendly one for everybody.”

RECOUP says it would like to see effective and practical resource management plans in place for all music sports and entertainment event and hopes to use its experience in this area to work with more brand owners and event organisers to implement