Dutch government considers stricter rules to prevent hearing damage

More and more festivals and indoor events are working with ECO (recycle) tokens these days, including all festivals from Q-dance, B2S, and more. You get this token at the beginning of the festival and for the rest of the day you can hand in your plastic cup for a new one. But what exactly is the point of this?

Right before corona, ID&T (part of Q-dance) started a test during Awakenings. Since then, at all ID&T festivals and events, we get an eco token upon entering the event. But also at other festivals and even at indoor events you see them more and more, like at the Ziggo Dome or AFAS Live.

The moment you get a beer at the bar (or anything else), you must turn in this ECO token. When your beer is empty, you are supposed to return your cup for a new one. If you had already thrown away your cup, you have to pay an extra (half) token for a new cup (in addition to the tokens you already paid for the beer itself).

ECO TOKENS, WHY?

From 2024, serving plastic cups will be banned. But, there is an exception: if festivals can recycle 75 percent of the cups the organization may still use disposable plastic. By 2027, even 90 percent of cups must be recycled. So these systems help festivals meet the new requirements. This, of course, has everything to do with throwing away plastic unnecessarily and reusing it instead.

In addition, it is also nice for festival visitors not to walk around on a blanket of plastic cups at the end of the day. Besides that all venue floor’s were full of plastic cups, the trash cans were also ram full of cups. So even though it takes some time to get used to, it’s actually a win-win situation for the visitor and the organization to recycle the cups.

READ MORE