Øya Festival

Date: August 10th – 14th
Location: the Medieval Park, in the city center of Oslo
Capacity: 75.000 in 4 days
Website: www.oyafestivalen.com

The Øya Festival is a festival put together by music lovers, for music lovers, and with a focus on presenting a cutting-edge bill with a big, Scandinavian heart. Where else would you find such great and diverse artists as The Knife, Band Of Horses, High On Fire, Beck, and Yoko Ono all sharing the same backstage?
The Øya Festival is held in what is called the Medieval Park in Oslo, Norway – a beautiful spot surrounded by white, sandy beaches, the Oslo Fjord to the south, and the Oslo skyline to the west. The Medieval Park is also the site on which the capital of Norway was founded a thousand years ago – and it’s only a short walk to the city center of Oslo, which creates an exciting rendezvous between nature and culture.
Audience and artists are presented with a festival area consisting of trees, green grass, and water, accompanied by stages, shopping streets, and small shops serving drink and food. The Eastside, where the Medieval Park is located, is undoubtedly where the action is when it comes to Norwegian music, and the area is also the nation’s primary cultural melting pot. In the years to come, several hundred million Norwegian “kroner”, both state and private, will be invested here, for the development of new housing areas, and the new Opera House, which will be the Medieval Park’s closest neighbor in the Harbor area.
The Øya Festival takes green responsibility.

Øya’s goal is to build a profile as one of the most environmentally sound festivals in Norway, and wishes to give its visitors an opportunity to act environmentally conscious as well. Øya wants to give the audience an opportunity to act responsibly with regards to the environment, and not just thinking about doing so.
Food, eating utensils, and drinking vessels will be composted and become garden mould. There is a deposit on drinking vessels, and they will be used for producing heat and energy. All of the Øya promotional material is printed on recycled paper.

A new development this year is that the Festival now has access to sustainable landline power. That means the removal of a large number of diesel generators from the festival area. On one of their stages the Festival is using only LED lighting, making the concerts a visual and more sustainable pleasure.
Environmental handbook for Festivals

In close cooperation with GRIP, a foundation created by the Norwegian Ministry of Environment, the Environmental Handbook for Festivals and Outdoor Events was made. The handbook builds upon experiences made by the Øya Festival and other Norwegian and foreign festivals and cultural events.
The book depicts how festivals can be adapted to the environment, with many concrete examples on how to organize the environmental work, map the environmental strain and carry out, follow up, and document environmental measures. Other festivals and outdoor events can benefit from the book.
“We’ve seen the need for such a book right from the start. If you’re holding a festival and want to build an environmentally sound profile, there is in any case a jungle out there of suppliers who deliver products or services that may or may not be equally environmentally sound. Good intentions and ideas about sustainability can easily be stopped by a backwards bureaucracy. The environmental handbook is intended as a tool for those who want to kick their festival up a notch or two.”
http://www.environmental-handbook.com

For more information, please check www.oyafestivalen.com