Large piles of plastic cups on the dance floors will be a thing of the past at festivals soon. Dutch State Secretary Vivianne Heijnen (Environment) wrote in a letter to the House of Representatives that all disposable cups and cutlery must make way for reusable materials: such as a cup that you use all day long.
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With the new measures, the State Secretary wants to reduce the large numbers of plastic products. “Every day, in the Netherlands alone, we throw away 19 million plastic cups and food packaging after a single use. We should not continue to burden future generations with our actions,” Heijnen writes in her letter to the government.
In recent years, several (major) festivals and events have made use of an ‘eco token’: a coin that you can exchange for a cup at the bar. For some it takes some getting used to to throw the cups on the floor, but other festival visitors say that it saves a lot of mess on the dancefloor and that you can’t slip on a lost cup. “Many entrepreneurs are already consciously working on this. This way, we prevent plastic waste, we handle raw materials more carefully and we leave a cleaner world behind.”
No more sea of plastic cups at festivals: use of soft cups is still possible
Good to know is that festivals and events that use a return system such as the ecocoin can ‘just’ continue to use the well-known soft cups. As long as 75 to 90 percent is collected for high-quality recycling, hard cups are not mandatory.
Footage taken from Facebook page Intents Festival
