Resurrection Fest

Festivals already bring together millions of people with an extraordinary capacity to activate communities. The next step is to turn that participation into a new competitive advantage and connect it with some of the greatest challenges of the 21st century.

With this vision, Universal Plastic designs an ad hoc campaign for Resurrection Fest and Bring The Noise that shows how technology expands a festival’s value proposition by turning citizen participation into environmental intelligence that contributes to ocean regeneration.

Resurrection Fest and Bring The Noise share the vision of building an impact that goes beyond the festival experience. To make this possible, we designed a participatory experience that turns attendees into protagonists of a citizen science project.

Through Universal Plastic’s mobile app, each participant records waste during beach clean-ups following a standardised scientific protocol. Each observation includes georeferenced information and becomes reliable, verifiable environmental data that is useful for research.

Technology turns thousands of individual actions into environmental intelligence. This approach generates scientific evidence to identify waste accumulation patterns, prioritise actions, assess conservation measures and support the design of public policies based on a greater knowledge of the territory.

The campaign activates the festival community and extends its reach thanks to the collaboration between Universal Plastic, Resurrection Fest, Bring The Noise and Xove Town Council. The festival’s post on Instagram reaches more than 43,500 views and the outreach by the Town Council adds nearly 3,000 more views. The initiative also gets coverage in media such as El Ideal Gallego and COPE, bringing science to new audiences and strengthening the community’s commitment.

Participation also translates into measurable results. During the first days, attendees generated more than 3,000 plastic waste records that make it possible to identify materials from seven countries, associated with seven industrial sectors, and even packaging made more than four decades ago that still remains in the ocean. Each record expands the available knowledge on marine plastic pollution.

All the information becomes part of ONDAs, the data infrastructure developed by Universal Plastic and backed by Spain’s Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and is integrated into UNESCO-IOC’s Ocean Data and Information System. In this way, the knowledge generated during the festival feeds an international ocean resilience network and contributes to progress on Sustainable Development Goal 14.

Cecilia Duarte, Environment Councillor at Xove Town Council, explains the value of turning a beach clean-up into useful data to improve coastal management.

COVERAGE

The campaign was shared by media outlets, institutions and channels linked to the festival, bringing citizen science and marine plastic pollution to new audiences.