Inside The World’s First Zero-Waste Music Event: How Finland’s Flow Festival Went Green

Festival season is about to begin – and with millions of us preparing to flock to the summer’s biggest events, organisers are looking at new ways for us to limit waste without compromising on the experience. After all, a weekend of dancing, drinking, eating and music shouldn’t result in a plastic mountain. No more so than Finland’s Flow Festival, which quietly went zero waste in 2019 and has led the charge in eco conscious event production ever since.

So, how do you create a zero-waste festival? As Flow has shown, there are lots of little changes that add up. Firstly, it has a cleaning staff of 400, who sort recycling by hand, powering the event using green electricity and buying carbon credits. This is no mean feat, considering the Helsinki-based festival welcomes 90,000 fans every August (this year’s headliners are Charli XCX, FKA Twigs and Little Simz).

Flow also no longer prints staff T-shirts – ditto for service entrance signage – and vendors are not allowed to give out fliers, stickers or plastic swag. As the festival’s COO and production manager Katariina Uusitupa explains, the team aren’t afraid to take steps towards not only creating an ecologically sound event, but also raising awareness around how our daily choices affect the environment.  

“If you ask fans, ‘What are the core values of Flow?’ they’ll say, ‘Responsibility and sustainability,’” she says. “When we cut red meat and poultry from our menus a few years ago, that got a lot of attention. Some people were like, ‘Now I have to carry my own sausages to the festival!’ But the people who were actually Flow’s audience were just like, ‘Way to go! Thank you for leading with that example and using your platform to make these things visible.’”

Events across the world are actively looking to follow suit. Reading and Leeds Festivals in the UK have introduced eco campsites – an offering that jumped from 1,000 spaces in 2022 to 8,000 in 2023 due to demand. Glastonbury has introduced an entire slate of green initiatives aimed at encouraging visitors to use less. Even small actions such as reusable cups at Primavera Sound in Barcelona can make a big difference. But some are taking more sweeping measures in the name of sustainability.

At Øya in Norway, volunteers can sort trash by hand in exchange for entry to the festival. Way Out West in Sweden cut meat and most dairy from its food outlets in 2012 – and, since then, it has taken on enough earth-friendly projects to become the first music festival in the world to become ISO 20121-certified as a sustainable event.

For its 21st year, Flow Festival will running from 8-10 August at Suvilahti, its usual incredible former power plant-turned-industrial complex setting. While Katariina would be sorry to lose the festival’s signature edgy surroundings, she says they are looking for a new location in future to allow for additional leaps forward in sustainability.

“The area where we are right now, the facilities are not so great,” Katariina admits. “So while we have been searching for the new venue, we have been keeping in mind the infrastructure surrounding electricity, for example. Also, because the biggest impact to the environment of our festival is the audience’s travel to the spot, the more central and easily accessible the place is, the more environmentally friendly it is. We don’t want to move out to a distant field where there’s no transport.”

There’s a temptation to think of entertainment and music festivals as separate from daily life. However, only when they’re viewed as an extension of our existence can questions of waste management and sustainability be addressed.

“I visited a live music conference here in Finland [recently],” Katariina, “and there were several ecological calculation tools that were presented. Some of the bigger festivals in Finland haven’t been calculating their emissions beforehand. This is now something fresh and new for them. In that sense, [Flow] was at the front line.”