Melodic Wood

See what happened when thousands of crushed cans were recycled into a festival wonderland.

See how repurposed cans commissioned new trees at one of Ireland’s most sustainable music festivals...

New to the festival scene in Ireland, and based at the picturesque Curraghmore Estate, Waterford, All Together Now festival is built on a foundation of sustainability – one where single-use plastic is banned. In the organisers’ words, it’s a festival that’s “committed to reduce waste drastically on site, use green suppliers where possible, and use environmentally friendly, compostable materials at our festival.”

And that’s a goal we can really get behind.

Our ongoing sustainability mission is to reach a ‘World Without Waste’, which is why we headed down to All Together Now with an installation built specifically to promote recycling – and give back to nature at the same time. Here’s everything you need to know…

Turning cans into trees

Made from thousands of collected cans, the aluminum trees inside our stunning ‘Melodic Wood’ installation represent hundreds of new oak and birch trees that will be commissioned by the Native Woodland Trust. That’s because each can we collected from festival-goers was turned into recycled leaves, and each leaf means a further donation from Coca‑Cola.

The Native Woodland Trust is the only environmental organisation in Ireland with a focus on saving the last of Ireland's Ancient Woodlands, now down to as little as 0.1% of their former extent. The aim? To recreate an Irish woodland, as close as possible to what would have naturally existed there.

Our trees will be commissioned at Grace Dieu, Co. Waterford, which is managed by the Native Woodland Trust, to ensure our legacy lives on where All Together Now festival was born.

All told, we collected and recycled 5,152 cans, 10.3k leaves were pressed and a total donation of €10,300 will commission 412 trees for Waterford.

The resulting Melodic Wood, as well as marking an awesome stride forwards for the Irish countryside, was a stunning, relaxing place to come and reflect in-between sets, with a soundscape written especially by Dublin-based electronic duo Prizm. You can see how it turned out here:

“It’s an eleven-minute track and it’s the kind of thing I’d love to stumble across at a festival during the night,” the band told Nialler9.

In four days, most festivals leave behind as much waste as an average town. A lot of that waste – like our beverage’s cans and bottles – can easily be recycled, so we believe it’s important to educate people how and why it’s important to do so.

The Melodic Wood does just that – helping us spread the word and complete the journey through the commissioning of brand new trees, leaving behind a real milestone in our World Without Waste journey in Ireland.

For those unsure, ‘World Without Waste’ is Coca‑Cola’s ambitious global strategy to collect and recycle the equivalent of every can or bottle that we sell by 2030. You can read much more about it here.