Measuring is knowing is the program where Into The Great Wide Open accurately visualizes its own footprint. This is an essential step in the pursuit of a circular and climate-positive festival and world. Necessary to measure progress and adjust where needed.

For this, Lab Vlieland developed in collaboration with Greendeal Circular Festivals, Utrecht University, The Revolution Foundation, Royal Haskoning DHV, and ITGWO the ‘Green Deal Circular Festivals Monitor’ a new festival monitor for climate emissions and material use. This advanced GDCF monitor accurately visualizes the festival footprint and is specifically built by and for festivals. This is currently used by about 40 festivals in Europe.

Furthermore, Into The Great Wide Open uses a cashless payment system, which, in addition to ease of use and no more festival coins, also significantly facilitates and makes the collection and analysis of sales data much more accurate.

Klimato

To gain even more insight into our climate footprint, we are, just like last year, collaborating with the Swedish Klimato tool. By entering the quantities, the country of origin, and the farming method per ingredient for each dish, we get an accurate picture of the climate footprint of each dish and the total food-related climate impact of the festival. The tool will also measure other sustainability factors this year such as; water, land use, land use.

For each dish at ITGWO 2024, we have this year a Klimato score that indicates what the climate footprint of the dish is. Klimato bases its labels on the One Planet Plate concept from WWF: to stay within the 1.5 degrees of warming from the Paris climate agreement, we all have a 'budget' of an average of 11 kilograms of CO2e per week. Converted, you come to about half a kilo of CO2e per meal. To make it easier to use this knowledge for better food choices, Klimato has devised three labels:

With ITGWO, we also aim for around 0.5 kg CO2e per meal.

After last year, we know that the average ITGWO festival meal was around 0.4 kg. That is very good news, this proves that a delicious, attractive, and healthy festival menu is possible within the climate limits. The ITGWO caterers show and taste that low-emission meals can be just as good, or even tastier than what people are used to.

The individual product emission data - individual meals - will then also be linked to the digital sales data of the festival, allowing for a very detailed footprint for drinks and food for all of ITGWO to be calculated.

Since food and drink - the production - account for about 20% of the festival's total emissions, there is a lot to gain here.

Reporting

From last year, we now know quite well what the footprint looks like. To visualize this in an Into The Great Wide Open way, we made an infographic. This shows what the status was after the 2023 edition.