Flow Festival, one of the most esteemed music and arts festivals in Northern Europe, has been a staple of Helsinki’s urban culture for nearly two decades.

This summer, Flow partnered with us to propel their sustainability efforts to new heights. Together, we transformed a part of the festival experience into an activation that raises money and awareness for the most defining megatrend of our time: Climate change.

Festival experiences are about music, friends, summer nights – but, as temporary and village-like communities, they also provide a unique opportunity to experiment with new innovations for the circular economy and sustainable lifestyles.

Internationally recognized for a meticulously curated program and stellar festival area design, Flow Festival has also put a benchmark on the European festival scene by going entirely carbon neutral.

This year, we set out to prove a point: a small tweak in an existing value chain can create a big, positive impact. It’s music for friends, trees for the planet.

Our innovation taps into an anomaly in the Festival’s customer experience. For every drink, 1€ must be deposited for the container. Then, that euro has to be reclaimed in the most anticlimactic way.

In a magnitude of recent studies, reforestation has been proclaimed to be the most effective way to fight climate change.

By creating alternative return kiosks, we turned every drink into a rewarding act of planting a tree. The deposits from the return kiosks were directly channeled into donations for The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation reforestation projects.

For every container donated, one tree was planted, removing one tonne of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over its lifetime. We set the goal to offset the daily CO2 emissions of all festival goers, for the entire three-day festival experience.



A key feature in rewarding festival-goers for making a choice for the environment was visualizing the impact of each donation in real time – at the spot and the campaign website.

For this purpose, we designed, built, and soldered together the smart return kiosks by hand. A novel technology called edge-computing was utilized to make sure the kiosks function without a stable internet connection, and each kiosk was equipped with large displays to communicate a successful donation to the visitor.

A forest, created as the result of dancing, laughing, loving, and toasting together.
A celebration of the power of the individual in making the world a better place.
And a party that removed the equivalent of five days of CO2 emissions in the lives of everyone that took part in the best city festival of 2019.

The success of activations like this goes to show that rethinking dated processes and challenging conventions are how the better options stick and prevail.

Client
Flow Festival

Concept
Reaktor

Design
Reaktor
TSTO

Production
Reaktor