Dustbins with WiFi access: an innovation that helped trash collection at NH7 fest
Thursday April 10, 2014,
2 min Read
When was the last time you were rewarded for taking out trash? If you were at the NH7 festival then perhaps you must have been rewarded for putting trash in the bins provided at the venue. Sponsors MTS, activation agency Brandmovers and technology supporter Thinkscream got together to create the MTS Wifi Dustbin that was placed at different spots across the venue.
The Bacardi NH7 Weekender is an emergent music festival in India and the biggest festival for independent music in the country. Every year, thousands of music lovers throng the festival. However, all the fun and frolic at the event also gives rise to a lot of garbage, as most people attending the event don’t think too much about disposing waste in a proper manner.Music, cheer, food, alcohol makes the NH7 Weekender a very happy music festival, but after all that merrymaking the heaps of garbage that is strewn across the venue, makes it a nightmare. What the sponsors wanted to do was to target not just the people but a pattern of behaviour that could be changed.
Keeping the challenge in mind, the MTS Wi-Fi Bin was installed at each of the festival venues spread across Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata as an initiative to keep the premises clean. The Wi-Fi Bin gave free Wi-Fi access to anyone using it by flashing a code every time garbage was disposed in it. People could use the MTS 3GPlus Wi-Fi connection for free through the entire length of the festival.
Raj Desai, Co-founder, ThinkScream, the company that helped setup the whole technology infrastructure at the event, says, “We wanted to incentivize good and moral behaviour. The point was not to completely eliminate littering but to try and reduce it as much as possible.” While the exact amount of trash generated is not known, Raj says a good quantity of waste found its way into the bin.
Hopefully, such WiFi bins will help increase the waste collection at actual disposal points and participants coming to such festivals can make this a regular habit. According to estimates by Brandmovers, the Wi-Fi Bin was used by more than 10,000 people with 200 GB of data downloaded and more than 20 million+ people used free WiFi to access the internet at the festival.
This activation also won an award for innovative creation of a new medium at the Exchange for Media OOH Innovation Awards.