Peelings, leftover food, frying oil… While the doll festival in full swing in the Vendée, food waste accumulates on the site of the festival, which again welcomes more than 100,000 spectators until July 21. But this time, the bio-waste will not be thrown away with the run-of-the-mill, or for some distributed to nearby farm animals, as usual. Collected separately, the objective is to transform them into green gas.
“They will be transported to the Agribiomethane methanisation site, located in the town of Mortagne-sur-Sèvre, a few kilometers from the festival, reports GRDF. We hope to collect four tonnes. These are admittedly quite small volumes. [25.000 tonnes y sont traitées à l’année, soit la consommation annuelle de 1.600 logements neufs chauffés au gaz], but we provide a solution to the organizers, and we make festival-goers aware of this recycling loop, complementary to composting. »
Collect unconsumed Hellfest beer
After the Printemps de Bourges, several festivals in the West such as the Route du Rock in Saint-Malo have joined forces with GRDF to democratize the process, making it possible to produce renewable gas from organic waste. At Hellfest, 8m3 of unconsumed beer were, for example, recovered for these purposes by the methaniser in Cugand (Vendée), again very close to the site of the extreme music festival.
Enough to prepare minds for the proliferation of methanation sites (sometimes contested) in the territory, but at the same time meet the increasingly strong expectations of festival-goers in terms of energy transition. “After the returnable cups, the removal of plastic containers, we had to improve on sorting, to limit the unnecessary burial of waste”, recognizes Thomas Maindron, the director of the Poupet festival, where the dry toilets are already upgraded in biogas since last year. A green brigade of about fifty volunteers, in charge of all these questions, has even been created.