Nordic Wristbands and Stand For Trees - together for sustainable future

7,000 ancient trees have been protected with the introduction of the Stand For Trees scheme by Nordic Wristbands, strengthening the Company’s ongoing quest to minimise its carbon impact. 

Nordic Wristbands’ front-line approach to saving the environment has been to introduce a range of environmentally friendly, organic material products over recent years. With that still promoted as the preferred route to carbon reduction, the new agreement with Stand For Trees adds a significant layer in the journey to Net Zero, compensating the carbon dioxide emissions caused by fabric wristband and smart tag manufacturing, in 2023 and beyond. 

Based on 2022 production volumes, Nordic will protect around 7,000 ancient trees from destruction, as a part of a more comprehensive project in the 250,000-hectare nature reserve of Mai Ndombe in the People’s Republic of Congo in Africa. The project also focuses on securing education, healthcare and ensuring access to clean drinking water for approx. 30,000 local residents. In addition, the area is critical habitat for forest elephants and bonobos, our endangered ape cousins. 

Nordic CEO Jone Nuutinen states: “Over the years, we have introduced several organic and recycled material options for festival wristbands and consumables in general, which all have found their dedicated groups of users. While we promote these as the best way to protect the planet, a significant number of events still rely on the cheaper virgin polyester products, so we decided to find a project where our production-related CO2 emissions could be offset in an effective way. We are proud that with every 1,000 wristbands a festival buys from us, they save two ancient rain forest trees. Not bad.” 

Tom Herman, CEO of Stand For Trees, Stand for Trees, says: “At Stand For Trees, we applaud Nordic Wristbands for taking bold action toward carbon neutrality and making a tangible environmental impact. By offsetting the carbon footprint of their wristbands, they have demonstrated leadership in the events industry, showing that every element of event production can play a role in reducing emissions and mitigating climate change. “Through their contribution to Stand For Trees, Nordic Wristbands has effectively offset the polyester and plastics used in their wristbands and has made a significant impact in preserving critical forests, like Mai Ndombe, which provide essential habitat for wildlife and livelihoods for local communities. We are proud to partner with a brand that prioritizes sustainability and takes holistic action towards creating a brighter future for all.” 

Our emissions in a nutshell 

Balancing the amounts of polyester and PVC used in Nordic Wristbands equates to: 

• 15,063 full bags of mixed waste recycled 

• 120,000 kg of mixed waste recycled 

• 13,190 light bulbs replaced with LEDs 

• 2 railcars of coal unburned 

• 1,390,000 km cycled instead of driving with a car with a petrol engine 

• 75 petrol cars removed from traffic for one year 

So, every 1000 wristbands you purchase from us, two ancient trees are saved. We salute You!

MIT's database has been used to calculate emissions 

Emissions registry entry can be viewed here 

More information: 

Nordic Wristbands Jone Nuutinen jone@nordicwristbands.com 

Stand For Trees Natalie Steinheuer natalie@standfortrees.org

Avoiding pitfalls going cashless

It seems cashless payments are finally making a proper entry at festivals in Scandinavia aswell. This summer, we have had roughly a dozen RFID enabled festivals up here, which is approximately double from 2017, which then again realistically means, we are beyond the early adopter stage and already looking at this as a regular festival feature, just like the over-priced beer consumed in tens of thousands of litres every summer.

Reason why I am bringing up Scandinavia is not only because we are headquartered in Helsinki but also because we are used to paying for pretty much everything with our credit and debit cards hence one might think there is absolutely no need for such service over here. In addition to access control where technology smoothens the flow of people, reduces queues and virtually eliminates ticket fraud cases,  It seems festival visitors generally are happy with the cashless experience and as the benefits from production point of view for the promoters are obvious, I do not see a reason why this pattern would not grow and shape up bigger and better for another ten or so years.

As we are not directly involved in implementation of such services, but act as the manufacturer and provider of the wearables for events globally we have had an extraordinary unbiased view to what are the key things to look for when it comes down to choosing your provider, for both the wearables as well as the underlying software system.

On this post I will not go deep into do's and dont's of choosing the provider, but will focus on the reliability of the RFID wearable worn by the festival visitors. 

WEARABLES

Oh yes, those wristbands, usually with an ugly piece of plastic integrated. The plastic piece, which we call the Tag, on the most common festival wristband type is the smart part and one could call it a scaled down credit card, because, ultimately, that is what it is.

Depending on the system provider requirements, it may have similar security features than your credit card, and is used the same way as a credit card with near field communication feature, so on paper, reliability and usability should be as easy as using your credit card. Now, what could go wrong you may ask, I have never had problems with my credit card reliability, why should the tag on my wristband fail?

Hopefully it doesn't, but then again, there are thousands of small factories scattered around South-east Asia and China where one can have such product made, cheap, sometimes fast, and sometimes with the agreed specs, after all, they all claim to be the providers for Disney...

It was only less than ten years ago when we were still young and naive (and needed the money) and looking back, I admit, we had our situations with such providers. Dealing with such sometimes resulted in us still being young and naive but not having the money and on a few occasions not even the product we thought we’d ordered.

The difference between good and "good" can be huge: visually similar looking tags or cards may have a totally different life between the sheets of plastic, to mention but a few, there are different shapes to an antenna, some operate better than others. There are different methods of soldering the two parts (antenna and the chip) together, which is directly related to how good the tags actually is. There are different nominal frequencies to the same chip, so any big deviations from nominal reader frequency mean worse readability and worse customer experience. There are various methods of proof reading, which in other words mean your tags work or they don't and finally, there are different types of the same chip that do not perform well in all antenna configurations that again may lead into a bad customer experience and unhappy people..... and yes, before this gets too technical, things to keep in mind:

Make sure:

-that you get what you paid for
-that you get what you paid for in an agreed schedule
-that you get what you paid for in a fully functional form

and things to help you make sure everything goes smoothly

-your provider knows what they are talking about
-your provider has a history of successful deliveries of smart products
-your provider has a technological knowledge of such product
-your provider is involved in the manufacturing process of the tags one way or the other

It is not necessarily true that cheaper is by definition worse, but when it comes down to choosing a provider for payments and access control solutions, I would probably look at the details, ask around and make the right decision based on these.

Welcome!

Not much here yet, but we're tweaking things, and propably very soon, writing little stories about little things around us.... stay tuned!