Øya shares the secrets to its sustainability success

Having prioritised sustainability from its inception in 1999, Norway’s Øyafestivalen has helped pave the way for greener music festivals.

The Superstruct-backed event (cap. 22,000) has hosted the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The Cure, Lana Del Rey, Beck, Blur, Kendrick Lamar and Florence and the Machine, all while working towards the title of the world’s greenest festival.

The Oslo-based gathering has received the highest appraisal from A Greener Festival no fewer than eleven times, and was the first-ever event to be certified by Norway’s Environmental Lighthouse. Last year, the festival went meat-free and received the highest level of organic food certification available in Norway.

To mark Earth Day, Øya’s head of sustainability Marie Furseth has shared five simple tips to help other events kickstart their sustainability journey.

Measure your environmental impact.
It sounds a bit boring but if you don’t measure, then you won’t know where to start. Start by measuring your CO2 emissions and then your local impact. A festival influences the shops in the area, the hotels, the tourist-related businesses and lots more. When you start to map out your emissions and your impact on your local environment, you can start seeing where to make changes. Nobody’s perfect, but if you can start doing something, then you’re on the right path. Then you see results and it’s really fun, and you will want to continue.

Waste management is a good place to start.
Like everything, waste management is based on local conditions, so you have to see what you can do where you are. But for starters, cut all the giveaways and all the crap you give people and focus on the fan experience because that’s what lasts. People having a good time at your event is also sustainability work – you’re making a local society, you’re supporting your local businesses and neighbours etc. Also, cut single-use plastic. We have reduced our waste a lot over the years by using reusable glasses and forbidding giveaways. We’re now up to 73% sorting ratio with our waste management.

“It’s important to unite everyone on the task of sustainability, and even try to make it a habit”

Be wary of audience and artist travel.
Our most daunting sustainability challenge is travel emissions, from both artists and fans. I think this is well known in the festival business now that fan travel really fucks up your CO2 emissions. It’s like doubling the entire emissions. This year, for the first time, we got some numbers on audience travel. Fortunately, more than 70% of our audience lives in Oslo, so they walk or take the metro or bike. It’s all the other people. The small percentage of people who don’t live in Norway account for more of the festival’s emissions connected to transport.

It’s difficult to improve audience travel because it’s so based on other people’s decisions but we’re going to try to work more with the rail companies, for example, to make the train travel more fun and interesting. And of course, we’d like to figure out a way to reward the people who travel green but we haven’t really landed anything yet because it’s basically the first year we have a total picture. And I’ve gotta say, we were all a bit surprised how much it was of the total.

Ensure everyone is aligned on sustainability, from staff to suppliers.
It’s important to unite everyone on the task, and even try to make it a habit, so that whatever decision they’re making, they’re thinking about the environmental impact too. If you’re changing the supplier for wristbands, for example, check that they’re better than the old ones. Check that they’re recycled etc. You have to think about sustainability all the time, but after a while it becomes automatic. People in the administration come to my desk all the time asking me random stuff that I don’t know the answer to but we can figure it out together. And then you can also try to bring
others aboard, like partners and sponsors etc.

Just get started.
You have to adjust to where you are in the world, but just get started. And if you want inspiration or you have questions, get in touch, and we’ll try to nudge people in the right direction.

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