As a new festival we made it a priority to keep our ecological footprint as low as possible, Paradies Garten Festival is proud to share the facts and figures (both the good and the bad) of its sustainability efforts and to announce that we will be Austria’s first CO2 neutral Electronic Music Festival.
Although there is still plenty of room for improvement, the event wants to make its findings public, so that other event promoters can learn from them too. In this way, Paradies Garten doesn’t just contribute to lowering its own ecological footprint but the footprint of the whole festival industry as a whole too. The organization will disclose all the CO2 calculations, its successes and its failures, which will provide a lot more insights into how we can make our event scene more sustainable.
Total emissions of Paradies Garten Festival 2022 amounted to 113,9 tons of CO2 which is an emission of 15,8kg CO2 per visitor. In comparison, the Belgian edition of Paradise City one of the 3 greenest festivals in the world (*A greener festival 2022), reported a relative emissions per visitor of 10,5 kgCO2e in 2022. Although there are still improvements to be made, we can be proud of this result in our first edition.
Our biggest success in terms of CO2 reduction is our collaboration with the ÖBB offering free night trains from Bruck an der Leitha to Vienna on Saturday and Sunday. Over 62% of our visitors used the train to commute to the festival, which is a magnificent result. A special thanks to all the Paradiesvögel who contributed to this result!
Another exciting finding: 36% of our energy consumption came from green energy, more specifically from wind energy coming from the ECO-Plus Windpark plus a small share of solar energy. However, this also brings us to one of our main improvement areas: 64% of the energy consumption was sourced from industrial fuel. This fuel was used by our generator at the Camping Grounds which could not be plugged on the local energy grid, but also the machinery and trucks used at the festival used this regular fuel. Next edition we will try to replace the industrial fuel with biofuel to further lower the CO2 emissions.
43% of the emissions were generated by our suppliers supplying the materials to build the festival. We will carefully analyze the different suppliers for next editions and try to source materials from suppliers who are located close to the festival. Other major working points will be the improvement of waste management (more recycling initiatives) and the promotion of composting toilets. You can find more details from our CO2 emission in 2022 in the report from CO2 Logic.
This year, Paradise Garden Festival decided to fund a climate project in Uganda to support the development and distribution of efficient cookstoves to improve household energy efficiency, sustainably boost economic activity in Ugandan communities, improve health conditions, and reduce deforestation rates. More information about the project can be found in the Gold Standard Impact Registry.
Download the full report here: CO2 Logic Report / Paradies Garten
