Green Guardians 2026:
Festival Estéreo Picnic

Together with Páramo Impacta and Grupo Argos, we replaced traditional water-based counterweights with approx 85 tonnes of cement and 55 tonnes of sand, eliminating the use of nearly 140,000 litres of water

By IQ | 1 September 2026

The Problem There are thousands of things at every festival that make each show possible. Some are easy to see; others are almost invisible. Stage counterweights are one of them. For years, water has been used as a simple and effective weight for stabilising temporary stages.

But once the festival is over, it has no purpose. We wanted to break that linear cycle. At Estéreo Picnic 2026, we asked a simple question: “What if the thing that holds the stage…

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GREEN GUARDIANS 2026:

UBS Arena

Sending compostable materials to landfills releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas produced when organic materials break down without oxygen

Stagetruck

Stagetruck believe in green innovation and moving forward as a business. So it seemed like a logical next step to establish an electric fleet as soon as we could

Rotterdam Ahoy

Ahoy is located in a socially and economically disadvantaged neighbourhood, where residents and businesses face a range of interconnected challenges

Johan Cruijff ArenA

Beef is a major source of greenhouse gases, so with our catering partner, Levy Europe, we looked for alternatives

Dutch Barrier Services

Cees Muurling of Dutch Barrier Services wanted to create a barrier system that best suited the needs of tours, festivals, venues, and events

AEG Presents

Attacking the struggle of waste management through careful planning and thorough on-site implementation of our industry-leading recycling system led to us breaking records

Øyafestivalen

Øyafestivalen’s sustainability work is not just about our overall goals or documentation of our footprint

You.Smart.Thing.

Audience travel is consistently one of the largest and hardest parts of an event’s carbon footprint to influence, made by thousands of small individual decision

Echoes of Earth

The Octo Jones was a circular stage created by Echoes of Earth using recovered, recycled, reused, and rented elements across its construction and production

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