North Sea Jazz quits fossil fuel-based plastic packaging

This new collaborative effort by plastic manufacturers and the plastic users aspires not only to reduce the sheer quantity of plastic packaging, but also to expand the circular economy and recycling. All parties take responsibility for their own waste and will ensure the effective recycling and processing of the components into new products.

Together with Ziggo Dome and AFAS Live, MOJO announced to get rid of fossil-fuel plastics used for food and drinks this year. This means: the cups, plates, containers, cutlery, straws et cetera. In the future, these will exclusively be made of biobased materials. The agreement also states that biobased cups will be recycled and all other disposables that are made of biodegradable materials will be composted, together with food waste. This means MOJO will replace 10 million cups with a sustainable, recyclable biobased cup and reduce over 80,000 kilograms of fossil-fuel based plastics.

MOJO introduced the biobased PLA cup at Lowlands fourteen years ago. PLA is a renewable material made from corn or sugar beet. The cup looks and feels like a traditional plastic festival cup, but because it is made of bio matter, its CO2 footprint is much smaller. After Lowlands, Down The Rabbit Hole followed suit, as well as outdoor shows like the concerts at the Goffertpark. Seven years ago, all plastic plates, cutlery, straws and other packages used in food and drink stalls were replaced with biobased disposables. MOJO will now implement these at Pinkpop, North Sea Jazz, Stadspark Live, WOO HAH! and all outdoor shows. And thanks to the collaboration with Ziggo Dome and AFAS Live this also goes for a significant number of all their other concerts. This coming year it will be discussed with other concert venues and organizers to see if they are interested to join MOJO.

Biobased cups will be collected and sorted at all events, so they can be recycled. This is carried out on site, where possible. The PLA cup cannot be sorted and processed by the waste-processing industry yet. For this reason, MOJO is developing a cup-sorting installation. They expect to be able to collect up to 90% of all used cups so they can then be recycled. The remainder of the biobased cups will be composted, together with all other biobased food disposables used for food and drinks. In the summer of 2019 pilots will be carried out at Down The Rabbit Hole and Lowlands with composting these biobased disposables. At the other festivals the quantities of biobased disposable and their status for recycling will be studied.

Ruben Brouwer, director of MOJO: “Each year, we receive about 1.5 million visitors at our musical events. The fact that we will now use biobased disposables for food and drinks and will be able to recycle and compost these is a giant step towards producing our events in a more sustainable way. Our ambition is to make all events completely plastic-free and this is the ultimate solution towards reducing traditional fossil-fuel plastics.”