While waiting for 2024,
watch the festival's 2023 edition with this video!

Eco-designing a festival means asking the right questions at every step. For every subject, we try to find the best "eco-solution" to make our footprint as light as possible. Keep checking this website to follow our most recent ideas.

Good news: to get quickly and ecologically to our sites in Crest and Aouste-sur-Sye, festival-goers will be able to take advantage of a (completely flat) section of the Vélodrôme (bike-only path). Crest and Aouste are only a few pedal strokes apart
Tous les cyclistes, quel que soit leur provenance, pourront attacher leur vélo sur un grand parking spécialement prévu And cyclists can secure their bikes in a parking lot specially provided for this purpose. For night rides, please use lights and keep visible!

And of course, you can also carpool! Try the mo'vici platform here !

At Les Yeux Dans L’Eau, we've made our choice. Some of us (names will not be mentioned) have recurring nightmares of festivals that used disposable dishes and cutlery. These nightmares feature huge garbage bags full of dirty plastic exploding and killing everything nearby. The Walking Dead seems like a fairy tale by comparison. But seriously, though it involves a few extra chores, we think reusable tableware is a vastly superior solution.

Napkins
Our food corner won’t be offering paper napkins, either. Forewarned is forearmed! You will have to eat neatly. But if you just can't help but eat like a little pig, don't sweat it, we’ve got you covered. During our Zero Waste prep parties, we’ve patiently handmade personal fabric napkins out of upcycled towels. The opposite of single use, they can be washed and reused over and over. If you plan to be with us all 3 days, we’ll give you your own napkin ring – which of course we’ll store over the winter and reuse next year!

More seriously: paper manufacturing uses a lot of water and energy. In Europe, the paper industry ranks second in terms of freshwater consumption, as water is needed to extract cellulose from wood fibers. (The good news is that some paper manufacturers now use closed circuits to recycle water). The paper and printing industry accounts for 1.05% of global greenhouse gas emissions. When you think about all of the stages of paper towel manufacturing (harvesting, processing and bleaching of the raw material, packaging, shipping, storage, transportation to retailers…), it’s easy to understand our decision to go with upcycled and reusable materials.

Just so you know: the lifecycle analysis of the now ubiquitous EcoCups shows that, in order to compensate the carbon footprint of its manufacturing + the many washes, and possible recycling, one cup needs be used at least 100 times to deserve being called Eco anything. Which means: as much as we’d love for you to drink beer in a cup featuring our magnificent logo, you will not see Les Yeux Dans L’Eau EcoCups anywhere. We'll be using some of the many cups we all have hanging around. If you have your own Ecocup, please bring it along. If you don’t have one or you forgot, we’ll loan you one. We may even serve you wine or Clairette in a real glass.

Of course, all our food/drink suppliers are local, organic and ethical..

All food waste will of course be composted. For everything else, we have really pretty sorting bins.

Compost toilets, of course. We are partners with Les Gandousiers, a local company that makes and rents toilets (including one fully-accessible cabin) that are so pleasant you'll want to read the newspaper there. The sawdust comes from local carpenter friends. And it has been scientifically proven that sawdust from Crest smells 5 times better than the any other!

Thanks to a partnership with Smurfit Kappa, an eco-friendly cardboard manufacturer, our signage is designed and manufactured locally, and as much as possible from recycled materials. And cardboard, as we all know, is both recyclable and highly compostable

We’ve kept the hard part for last, but we have to confess that we disappoint our volunteers. Lending us a hand will not get you a magnificent T-shirt you can show off during the festival - and after. We thought about it and concluded that the last thing our planet needs is one more T-shirt. Hope it’s ok