Trash talk: What we did to cut Festival waste in 2025

Sat 26 Apr 2025

Perth, you loved our new hub the East Perth Power Station. People are still talking about it, and we know there's going to be heaps of great lasting memories. We're very happy to tell you that our impact on the environment was not so lasting! 

Waste is a huge problem when you’re running an event, but we’re pretty proud of the things we were able to do to limit what got left behind after the audiences and artists had gone. Behind the scenes we had a dedicated team sorting the waste into four streams on site.  

For those that like numbers we have some stats from our partner Write Solutions about what this actually meant: 

  • 79% diversion rate of waste from landfill 

  • 15 bales of cardboard (from sooo many pizza boxes) were made in our cardboard baler 

  • 1,980 litres of wine bottles were crushed, with 80% of that to be processed back into new bottles in South Australia through BottleCycler Australia 

  • 11,220 litres of FOGO waste will be turned into compost by Write Solutions – thanks to the fact that all food on site was served in compostable packaging.  

We took the mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle seriously, with most of the furniture at the Power Station coming from previous events or made from repurposed timber. Fun fact –the sand from EverNow event Song Circle was used as the base layer for the turf laid.  

It was a hot summer, and everyone was well onto staying hydrated with 28,055 drinks served in our Perth Festival cups, which were washed and dried onsite and reused. We served 23,219 drinks in cans and 21,835 were taken to Containers for Change – that’s a 94% recovery rate! We also provided water bubblers for patrons and water coolers back of house for artists and crew, which meant there were no nasty single use plastic bottles lying around. 

You, our audience, certainly did your bit to help us keep those transport emissions down. We had dedicated bike and scooter parking onsite and 90% of patrons used ride share, public transport or alternative methods to get to the Power Station. Our partner Beam Mobility has estimated that the use of shared e-scooters saved around 125 kilograms of C02 emissions alone! 

The best news of all for the environment is not just what we were able to achieve this year, but that we’re committed to doing even more in the future. As the saying goes, there’s no Festival on a dead planet, so we’ll do our best to help save this one.