The Summer of Sustainability (SOS) project is
an action learning partnership between four
major music festivals and Sustainability
Victoria from January to March 2008. The
SOS project aims to deliver the following:

1. Understand - Sustainability Victoria (through
our consultants, Creative Environment
Enterprises) will work with festival staff to
understand and address direct impacts across
three core areas – energy, water and waste.

2. Innovate - Develop and apply new
technologies and information to assist out-door
festival and event organisers actively create
more sustainable events (eg. worm composting,
mobile toilets, solar powered sound systems,
energy efficient
stage lighting).

3. Communicate – Develop and effectively
deliver information and resources to assist
festival organisers on their sustainable events
journey (eg. a key resource will be an educational
DVD exploring the issues surrounding sustainable
music festivals in Australia)

The music festivals involved are Falls Festival,
Big Day Out, St Jeromes Laneway Festival and
Golden Plains.

The project aims to raise awareness of sustainability issues at festivals by engaging interested people in
an on-line communication campaign (using
MySpace, Facebook and Youtube).

A sustainable events forum will be held in
Melbourne to launch resources developed during
the SOS project, in June 2008. The forum will
debate issues such as ‘carbon neutral events –
what does it really mean?’

Sustainability Victoria has been working with
Victorian events for the past 10 years through the
Waste Wise events certification program. The SOS project will expand on the resources currently
available through this program.

In 2006 – 2007 (financial year) over 200 events
were certified Waste Wise, recycling over 440
tonnes of waste. This means less rubbish clogging
our landfills, as well as saving around 9,000 kL of
water and 269 tonnes of greenhouse gas
emissions (or over 5 million black balloons –
1 black balloon equals 50 grams of greenhouse
gas http://www.saveenergy.vic.gov.au/ ).

Support the music festival mind-shift.
Visit http://myspace.com/sosmusicfestivals or http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=9094940659