Green Loop delivers at top London music festival

The Green Loop closed loop end of life recycling solution from paper hygiene products manufacturer Northwood was used at a key UK music event this summer. Green Loop successfully collected over 500,000 used paper hand towels that would otherwise not have been recovered for recycling.

Northwood collaborated with cleaning service supplier and contractor Nu Group, waste collection provider B-Sure Recycling and end user BST to recycle over 790kg of hand towels at American Express presents BST Hyde Park – a major festival, which brought thousands of attendees for eight days of live music.

Green Loop supported American Express presents BST Hyde Park in meeting its commitment for all waste to be either recycled, composted or processed through waste-to-energy by collecting the hand towels and recycling them back into new paper hygiene products

Helping the whole event to operate more sustainably, the project engaged with attendees and encouraged them to be more mindful when disposing of hand towels. Festival-goers simply disposed of used hand towels in dedicated collection bins, whilst the cleaning teams incorporated the waste into their existing routines, ready for collection by Northwood’s third-party waste partner B-Sure Recycling.

American Express presents BST Hyde Park enabled segregation at source, NU Group incorporated collection into its existing cleaning operations, B-Sure Recycling collected and weighed the material, whilst Northwood returned the recovered fibre into its recycling and paper manufacturing operations.

The project achieved some impressive key, measurable outcomes, which included a potential carbon reduction of 0.61tCO₂e. *

Northwood’s Life Cycle Assessment shows that recycling the hand towels through Green Loop leads to a 38 per cent reduction in carbon emissions compared with traditional disposal routes, highlighting the benefit of retaining valuable fibre within the circular economy.

Green Loop is typically used in conventional washrooms, rather than mass public events, where people may not follow the guidance on how to dispose of waste. However, only 25 kilos of paper was lost due to contamination.

After the success of this project, Green Loop will be used at another large-scale event at the end of this year.

Suzanne Johnson, Senior Site Manager at LS Events, said: “We were delighted with the results of Green Loop. The service was incredibly straightforward to facilitate within our existing event operations, with 790kg of used hand towels recycled back into paper hygiene products.

“We were pleased with the low levels of contamination in the material collected. At an event of this scale, seeing the public engage with the system and correctly dispose of their used hand towels was encouraging and reflected growing awareness of recycling and more responsible waste choices.”

Joel Quick, Sustainability Manager at Northwood added: “The project demonstrates that meaningful sustainability improvements don’t always require a completely new system. Sometimes, they come from closer collaboration, better segregation and finding a more circular destination for a material that was already being generated. American Express presents BST Hyde Park had already set the ambition. Green Loop helped to turn that ambition into measurable action.”

Green Loop is a comprehensive end to end recycling initiative, which was created to help customers lower their waste footprint by making it easier than ever before to recycle waste products in washrooms.

* The potential carbon reduction is based on Northwood’s Green Loop lifecycle assessment and the quantity of material recovered at BST Hyde Park. Thirty-eight per cent represents the potential reduction compared with traditional waste disposal routes.