Researchers and Roskilde Festival find green solutions together

Roskilde Festival gets everyone and everything a rockin’ - the music, feelings, parties and the setting. In the space of 100 hours, the festival becomes a city the size  of Aalborg and is nearly bursting at the seams. This makes it the ideal place to study sustainability. If the solutions to problems with, for example, food waste, trash piling up or use-and-toss housing work here, then they will also most likely be successful in the distant corners of the world.

Head of research and Professor Esben Rahbek Pedersen, CBS, explains:

-    Roskilde Festival is a city lab. Many of the problems evident in cities today are also visible at the festival, but in concentrated form. At the festival, researchers get a closer look at the challenges and can quickly see the effects of their experiments.

The collaboration between Roskilde Festival and CBS, “From Rio to Roskilde”, was named after the climate summit in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 . One of the conclusions of the summit was that companies with innovative, green business models must help solve the world’s climate problems. “From Rio to Roskilde” works in cooperation with the Confederation of Danish Industry and some of the confederation’s member companies on specific projects. This year, the project has also invited its German sister organisation, Bundesverbandes der Deutchen Industrie, or BDI, to visit.

A team of approximately 40 staff from CBS, supplemented by experts from Alborg University and the University of Copenhagen, turns Roskilde Festival into a research lab. Collaborating with companies like Rockwool and NCC Roads – and as something new this year, the dairy and fashion industries – gives “From Rio to Roskilde” yet another leg to stand on: live product development.

Some of this year’s exciting initiatives include a new version of the Rockwool home, which can potentially be used in refugee camps and is undergoing large-scale testing on festival-goers, who are also being nudged to clean up after themselves. The business community and volunteer organisations are participating in crash courses on sustainable business models. According to Professor Rahbek Pedersen, research from last year continues but is being taken one step further.

-    Our goal is to highlight sustainability issues with perspectives for all of us. Businesses and industry then have the responsibility to take these solutions one step further. We would like the business community to prioritise working on sustainability higher and to help a green export adventure grow out of the festival.

For more information, please contact head of research Esben Rahbek Pedersen , email: erp.ikl@cbs.dk or head of information Mikael Koldby,  email: mk.ea@cbs.dk, mobile: +45 40 20 44 54.

Starting Wednesday , you can follow the projects her: RiotilRoskilde.dk