Fundraising: Bottles Recycling

This article is part of the Festivals For Ukraine Toolkit.

• Creator: Music Saves UA & YOUROPE
• Published in: 2024

Festivals can raise a lot of awareness for important causes, but they can also implement various ways of raising meaningful funds for them. One such option is to recycle plastic and/or glass bottles and cans that are used all around the festival. Here are steps and suggestions on how to implement such a system:

• Deposit system. If your country has a country-wide Deposit Return System or a similar scheme, you can use it to raise funds by turning in the bottles collected at your festival. If no such scheme exists, you can introduce your own by adding a small extra charge for every bottled drink. We suggest anywhere between €0.10 and €0.50.
• Partner up. You can either collaborate with a local recycling company to handle the collection and recycling, or do it with your own efforts by buying or renting what is necessary and looking for volunteers among your festival audience. If you are raising money for Ukraine, you can follow a great example set by Lowlands Festival. They focused on recruiting Ukrainian volunteers and provided them with festival tickets, daily meals and comfortably equipped tents for free. As a result, more Ukrainians could enjoy the festival, talk to the audience about Ukraine and make new connections with local people with whom they worked side-by-side, helping their integration. Meanwhile, this made the international part of the volunteer team directly engaged with the topic of Ukraine, inspiring them to do more.
• Pre-festival promo. Promote the recycling scheme as much as possible before the festival starts. Your goal is to introduce people to the scheme and underline that it is a fundraising effort that everyone can join for free. Explaining that you can raise significant money together would be inspiring for the audience, prompting them to engage with the activity more. If this is a recurring thing at your festival, remind people how much you raised before.

• On-site promo. Once the festival starts, continue to promote the activity and its charity goal using banners, volunteers, festival app, festival booklet and stage screens. If you have a festival quest, you can integrate recycling into it. Gamifying the activity is great–people can throw the bottles in the bins from a small distance for prizes, etc. Update people daily on the total weight or amount of bottles already collected.
• Visuals. Creating eye-catching, memorable visuals goes a long way toward ensuring the audience is aware of the activity. You can create a mascot for this activity or collaborate with artists to push it even further. Pohoda Festival offers a great example with its planet and Ukraine mascots, which were used for bottle collection and other Ukraine-related activities. 
• Clever placement. Placing the collection bins near other installations and areas related to your charity of choice is a great way to connect all the activities. At Pohoda Festival, for example, the collection bins were also placed near the Music Saves Ukraine tent, prompting people to check it out.
• Results announcement. Once the festival is over and the collection results are in, announce them to your audience – how much was raised, where the money goes, how many bottles were collected, how much plastic was recycled and what the environmental impact is. Reinforce the fact that by having everyone at the festival join a simple activity together, you raised thousands of Euros for an important cause. This will reinforce the idea that every little donation or action matters and your audience to be more socially active.

Using this fundraising method, Music Saves Ukraine, together with Festivals like Pinkpop, Lowlands, and Pohoda, raised upwards of €6,000 per festival. By optimizing the process and iterating on it, even better results are certainly achievable.