Borrowed light, renewable beats
There’s something remarkable about the quiet shift happening in Europe’s festival culture. The last time I walked through a city street cordoned off for celebration, there were no single-use plastics in sight. Instead, volunteers handed out reusable cups. Solar-powered lights glowed overhead. A booth in the corner offered vegan snacks and set aside scraps for composting.
This is what some of our EU festivals already look like now. These weekend escapes, are becoming small-scale rehearsals for better cities. Places where joy and responsibility coexist, where even the bass line could be powered by wind.
Take DGTL in the Netherlands, where smart grids map the beat to the needs of the environment. Or Boom Festival in Portugal, where composting toilets and reforestation projects live alongside music stages and light shows. These are spaces where public transport is encouraged, carpooling is rewarded, and the energy powering your favorite set might come from the sun.
In Crickhowell, at the Green Man Festival, a ban on single-use plastics feels less like a restriction and more like a thoughtful invitation. Bring your own bottle. Fill it at the refill water stations. Stay awhile. It’s a kind of quiet activism that doesn’t shout, but endures. In Italy, Terraforma builds its stages from recycled materials and sends festivalgoers out into the surrounding forests to plant trees. Not because they have to but because it makes sense.
Somewhere along the way, festivals stopped pretending they exist outside of the world’s mess. They started acknowledging that, yes, joy leaves a footprint. And then asking how to make it smaller.
In 2024 I had a chance to work on the website and graphic design for TEXtival in Kortrijk, a local festival thriving to offer circular and vegan solutions.
Still, there’s resistance. I recently saw a photo from another event: plastic debris under stage lights, a backdrop of synthetic fog. In the comments, someone wrote, So this is how our festivals look now? And I couldn’t help but wonder: which “now” do we choose?
There’s borrowed light in all of this—shared lessons passed between cities, between neighbors, between someone mixing music and someone wrapping a vegan falafel. Across Europe, these experiments in sustainability are echoing outward. From the cobblestones of small towns to the edges of urban sprawl, festivals are becoming case studies in a different kind of celebration. One that cares not only about the crowd, but also the soil under their feet.
A blooming geranium on a windowsill can mean more than we think. And a plant-based kebab at a music festival might say more about the future than the next top down roadmap. What’s working here is not perfection, but persistence. What’s showing up again and again is care.
Festivals are temporary. But the ideas they carry don’t have to be.
