Green public events – raising awareness on saving resources and reducing waste at public events in Latvia and Estonia

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Project background: Public events are the mirror of the society, which reflects its behavior in general. At the same time, it is the space, where at specific moment of time many people are present and they are more reachable to deliver the message. A lot of waste has been produced, brought and left there. Environmentally friendly behavior and choices involves many aspects in terms of food consumption, packaging, energy use, etc. The development of the environmentally friendly behavior in society depends on many aspects such as availability of infrastructures, opportunities to behave environmentally friendly (waste sorting opportunities), information (what does it mean to behave environmentally friendly), good examples (better provided by popular people), attractiveness (videos, TV, campaigns) and more. The project with its campaign will contribute to the increase of the awareness of people in terms of resource efficiency. Taking into account that public events can be very diverse, starting from big festivals in open spaces (music, theater, city summer festivals), conferences, different kind of workshops in closed spaces, our approach is to choose several examples, pilot cases: Positivus Music festival; Viljandi Folk Music festival; indoor education festival in Tartu and conference in Valmiera. Cross-border nature: Estonians and Latvians are very similar by their habits, history, traditions, understandings and culture. These factors make it more efficient to communicate the same messages and to apply the same actions in those two countries. Lead Partner (NGO "Homo ecos:") is more experienced in organization of the public and media campaigns in Latvia, however in Estonia organizers of the public events are more flexible in trying new things, e.g. deposit cup system, so there will be synergy created between countries to transfer the experience, best practice and spread the word to another organizations who are involved in organization of public events. The objective: The objective of this project is to raise awareness on more environmentally friendlier behavior in general, but especially focusing on waste reduction and energy saving issues among active adults and youngsters, who attend public events by organization of interactive activities at those events, involving the organizers and service providers, and showing that there is also another way how to organize public events. Main activities: To facilitate the change in behavior of participants of public events the awareness raising campaign will be organized contributing to the greener and environmentaly friendlier events at: 1. Positivus Music Festival, 2. Viljandi Folk Music Festival, 3. Young Scientists Festival in Tartu, 4. Business Conference in Valmiera. To support the actions at the events the overall media campaign in Latvia and Estonia will be organized. At the same time to disseminate the results and lessons learned of the project, received feedback from the campaigns, the recommendations will be developed and disseminated to the organizers of the public events in both countries.

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