Happiness festival, as the name suggests, is a festival that promotes happiness. I learned about this festival in 2018 from a fellow environmentalist in Jakarta. He advised that I go to this festival to be inspired. That year I went, and learned about some stuff like smart composting. Now in 2019 on 27th of April, I came back to happiness festival to see what’s new.

Happiness festival in 2019 is held at a different venue from the previous year. This year it is located at Banteng Field, or also known as Lapangan Banteng in Indonesian. The venue is more spacious than the previous year, thus the number of booth in this year’s festival from my observation is two to three times more from before. There are some old booths that attended the previous festival, mixing in with all the new booths.

I walked around the festival looking at booths but not really visiting them, because not all of them are about the environment. I saw a jelly cup, which is an innovation that people have said would be able to replace plastic cups. Out of curiosity, I visited the booth and bought a cup. It costs Rp40.000 where the buyer can refill the drink just once. The drink people can choose from was either a markisa (passion fuit) or a mango. I suppose the drink costs Rp30.000 with refill and the cup Rp10.000. The base of the cup was given a banana leaf and I am guessing that the purpose of it was so it wouldn’t get dirty. The jelly cup was supposed to have a flavor, but I didn’t taste anything on mine. I actually had a hard time eating the cup because it was flavorless. So even though it might be a good alternative to plastic, finishing the jelly cup would be an issue.

Walking around the festival, I noticed that the trash bins were made from recycled banner. There was a massive campaign period in Indonesia, thus making unused banner abundant. The organization that turned the banner into trash bins was Parongpong. I visited their booth because I wanted to know something. The trash bins were categorized into food waste, recyclables, and sanitary residue. I know that food waste can be turned into compost. Recyclables can obviously be recycled. So what about sanitary residue? Especially since baby diapers can often be found washed up on beaches. It turns out that there is currently a new innovation in turning these residues into house foundation bricks. Parongpong brought the machine to the festival, but I didn’t see it because it was at a different location and rain poured down making my time spent at the festival cut short.

Next to Parongpong booth was another booth called Scavengers. I visited the booth because I was curious with the name. So, it turns out that Scavenger is an application that picks up people’s trash. Like an online transportation app, where the drivers are scavengers and the order are the trash. The people who have trash would have to divide them into different categories that are recyclables. After that, an order could be placed for scavengers to pick them up. I think that this is a good innovation. People can start separating their trash and give it away to scavengers.

I wish I had visited every booth at happiness festival because I feel that there were other amazing things. However, I had other things to attend to plus rain had started to pour heavily when I left. I hope that next year there would be another happiness festival, where the booths are just as amazing as this year.