THINKING GREEN CAN HAVE ITS REWARDS FOR HEBCELT FANS
- Festival goers urged to support Recycle Week
- HebCelt highlighting environmental initiatives
- Bid to become greenest eve
News Release
Hebridean Celtic Festival
Year of Natural Scotland
Issued - 17 June 2013
For use - embargoed, Thursday 20 June 2013
Music fans attending this year’s Hebridean Celtic Festival will recycle record amounts of waste as event organisers step up efforts to ensure it is one of the greenest festivals in the country.
The HebCelt team is using Recycle Week to highlight to its international audience, volunteers, suppliers and this year’s performers the need to re-use materials where possible.
For the first time the award-winning HebCelt will have Recycle and Reward machines placed at three sites around the main arena and each location will also have an organic bin for all food waste.
The festival, being held this year from 17-20 July in Stornoway, is one of only 8 venues across Scotland this year to host the innovative Recycle and Reward machines and gives fans the chance to win prizes for recycling plastic bottles, cans and corn-starch beer mugs.
Among the prizes on offer are an iPad, iPod Nanos, a family weekend ticket for next year’s HebCelt, festival hoodies and t-shirts as well as vouchers for snacks or drinks.
It is hoped that the local pilot projects, part of the Scottish Government’s Zero Waste Scotland programme, will encourage people to recycle more and limit the amount of used drinks containers going to landfill.
The project is the latest green initiative by HebCelt which this year graduated from the Carbon Trust Scotland’s Carbon Management programme. The festival is committed to decreasing its carbon emissions by 14 per cent by 2017 which will reduce its environmental impact and cut costs.
The Hebridean Celtic Festival Trust has drawn up a series of long-term aims to help minimise the event’s impact on the environment. This includes the sustainable use of resources, reducing emissions and raising awareness of environmental matters.
Caroline MacLennan, the festival director, said: “We take our environmental responsibilities very seriously. We are blessed to be able to stage an event like Hebcelt against the unique backdrop that we have and we appreciate the importance of preserving it.
“By making an even greater commitment to recycling this year, including introducing the new machines, more waste than ever before will be recycled which makes long-term economic and environmental sense.”
Recycling Week, run by Zero Waste Scotland, is now in its third year. This year’s theme is ‘Recycling at home and away…’ Over 200 organisations across the country have already registered to take part.
Iain Gulland, Director, Zero Waste Scotland, said:
“Recycle Week highlights the importance of recycling wherever we are, and is a great time to reflect on how well Scotland is doing in using all the facilities on offer at home, through central collection points, when we’re at work, shopping or anywhere else.
“However there’s still more we can do to help capture the value of unwanted materials. Through this pilot with Hebridean Celtic Festival, we want to assess how incentivising these recycling schemes impacts on recycling rates and complements other schemes designed to capture valuable materials.
“Recycle Week offers a great opportunity for us all to join together and celebrate how far we’ve come already, and to make an extra effort to recycle more.”
The 18th HebCelt will be headlined by Van Morrison, Dougie MacLean, Capercaillie, The Battlefield Band and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers.
It attracts interest from across the world and was recently selected as one of the Top 10 UK summer festivals by influential music publication Songlines for the third successive year.
Tickets have already been snapped up by fans across the UK and Ireland, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America.
The line-up also includes Karine Polwart, Darrell Scott, Pete Roe, Paddy Callaghan, and local artists Iain Morrison, The Boy who Trapped the Sun and Face the West, as well as Dundee’s Anderson, McGinty, Webster, Ward & Fisher; Lau, voted ‘Best Group’ at this year’s Radio Two Folk Awards; Orcadian eight-piece The Chair; The Hot Seats, from Virginia; Manchester outfit The Travelling Band; Welsh band Rusty Shackle; Fatherson and The Dirty Beggars and Donald MacDonald & The Islands, from Glasgow, Rose Parade, a four-piece from Ayr and Gria, winners of this year’s One Step Further competition.
For further information contact
Suzanne Kane
Lucid PR
01463 724590; 07990 803584
Suzanne@lucidmessages.com
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