Wanderer Festival met its objective of putting sustainability front-and-centre.
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That is the assessment of Hugh Pitty, the Bega-based ecologist who led the 130 volunteer members of the green team.
"Obviously running the event for the first time on a new site meant there were a lot of things learnt and things that can be improved but we did pretty well, particularly on the educational front by raising awareness," Mr Pitty said.
There were no red bins at the festival or at the on-site camping grounds. The bin stations only catered for what could be composted or recycled.
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Over the course of the three-day festival, Mr Pitty's green team did 180 shifts on the 25 bin stations in the performance and camping areas - plus nine shifts operating carts and trailers that took full bins to the zero-waste depot.
An early bird crew started at 6am on Saturday and 7am on Sunday to collect anything left on the site.
Mr Pitty said around six cubic metres of landfill was collected "which is pretty good considering 8000 people at a first-time event on a site we had never been on before".
He said people would have come from places where FOGO was not yet an option so it was beneficial for them to have been introduced to source separation without having landfill as an option.
Raising awareness
Festival organiser Simon Daly said event managers had a great responsibility to make people think about the waste they generated.
"To have no red bins sends a very strong message."
A highlight for Mr Pitty was Sunday evening when festival patrons may have been less conscientious and one of the green composting bins had been taken away for emptying.
"Rather than people putting everything into the yellow recycling bins, they piled it high on the green compostable bin that was still there," Mr Pitty said.
"I was very impressed."
Mr Daly said for him "the biggest winner is people just thinking about things".
Humans are the solution
Mr Pitty said composting and recycling were part of the evolution towards zero-waste, but said considerable water and energy was used to produce compostable food packaging, cutlery and crockery used at 'green' festivals.
"The sustainability is questionable," Mr Pitty said, who thought the ultimate solution at festivals was entirely reusable packaging, cutlery and crockery.
That would mean employing people to collect dirty items from designated sites, washing them and returning them to vendors in baskets.
Another necessary step would be separation of food from containers, which again involved human beings.
"We do it in our homes and in restaurants so we need to get it organised for events."
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