Regina is one of the thousands of people who enjoyed the Cruïlla Festival, held last July at the Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona. When choosing one – and there are many, since in Spain there are about 900 festivals a year, according to the Yearbook of Cultural Statistics – Regina takes into account the poster, but also its environmental impact. “I look a lot at how the issue of plastic is treated, that the glasses are reusable and that you don’t go consuming one glass after another throughout the festival. I also value accessibility. Here you can come by public transportation and that prevents everyone from coming with their own private vehicle, polluting much more,” she declares.
Having a poster with Franz Ferdinand, Carolina Durante or Viva Sweden, among others, was a more than powerful attraction. Art, comedy and gastronomy were added to the musical offering, but Cruïlla’s commitment goes further. Its objective is to become, year after year, an experience, a sustainable mini-city test. Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente, biologist and daughter of the great environmentalist popularizer, was able to experience it firsthand and chat with the creators of this successful project that demonstrates that great cultural events can be attractive and, at the same time, minimize their environmental impact.
Festivals are real energy guzzlers. Every time a group sets foot on stage, it demands an enormous amount of megawatts to make possible the light effects, the volume of the music, the projections, the smoke explosions… In addition, the common areas must be illuminated, connected refrigeration chambers for the restaurant areas and provide air conditioning in the work areas and dressing rooms. A madness from an energy point of view in which there can be no failures. The music needs to be loud and uninterrupted, the lights need to be stunning, and no one wants their soda to be hot.
At Cruïlla they set out to achieve all this by dispensing with generator sets, with direct connection to the grid and with electricity from renewable sources. “We reached an agreement with Endesa because it is the only one that guaranteed us a 100% renewable electricity supply, even with the usual demand peaks of a festival,” says Jordi Herreruela, event director. In fact, it could be said that the energy supplied to the festival came from the hydraulic power plants of the Pyrenees and that it supplied “a consumption similar to that of 250 homes in one night. In other words, we are not only being responsible with the environment. We are also very efficient with respect to consumption.”
To cover this greater energy demand, festivals usually use diesel-based generator sets. Especially, to guarantee the electricity peaks of the scenarios. It is not going to be that, at the moment of maximum frenzy of the encores, the headliner is left in the dark. “Cruïlla is fed 100% from the supply network. For an event of this size, it means stopping the consumption of approximately 13,600 liters of diesel, the equivalent of a car traveling 300,000 kilometers. Or, what is the same, go around the world 7 times. Replacing fossil fuels with electricity from renewable sources allows us to stop emitting about 36,000 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere,” highlights María Lacasa, director of sponsorships at Endesa.
The festival does its homework by putting all means to reduce the environmental impact and not only with regard to electricity. They set out to be a zero waste festival by installing water fountains throughout the venue and promoting the use of polypropylene cups that are reusable up to 150 times, returnable and without a logo, which are used in other events. They also provided aluminum canteens to staff members and artists to avoid plastic water bottles. They even opted for an ingenious merchandising strategy by printing the festival designs on garments that the public could bring from home to avoid surplus T-shirts with the festival logo.
Turning festivals into experiences is part of the liturgy of these mega-events. This is highlighted by the professor of Arts and Humanities Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) Alba Colombo, director of the university master’s degree in Cultural Management (interuniversity: UOC, UdG) and principal researcher of Festivals, Events and Inclusive Public Space ( FESTPACE), a European project that analyzes the use of public spaces in Europe for all types of events. Colombo emphasizes that “what the public buys is not so much a concert, but everything that happens within the event.”
Some sell Instagrammable spaces. Others turn rest areas into authentic amusement parks, with ferris wheels or merry-go-rounds. Jordi Herreruela, director of the festival, was clear that the magnet of the festival had to be his commitment to sustainability. Instead of another mega-festival, they created a unique festival, with a more moderate capacity, of 25,000 people per day in a space of 100,000 m2. “It is like an ephemeral city with the ideal size to launch pilot tests of waste management, mobility or energy management,” he proudly explains to Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente.
In a city like Barcelona, ??with two other large festivals consolidated and very focused on the international audience – Primavera Sound and Sónar –, their proposal was a nod to the local. Starting with local products and continuing with live exhibitions by urban artists with the support of Disseny Hub and the Tourism and Creative Industries Directorate of Barcelona City Council. The response was immediate: 95% of its audience was from Barcelona. “In this way we eliminate many of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, since a good part of the carbon footprint of a festival is due to the travel of its attendees,” Herreruela details.
To speed up access with the smallest possible footprint, public transport and zero-emission mobility were promoted. For these non-polluting vehicles, Endesa provided free parking spaces. Small details that add up and turn many attendees, like Regina, into unconditional audiences for future editions.
