Greentech Festival – N&M is partner due to its passion for green technologies

The CleanTech Media Awards for sustainability premièred in 2008. Eleven years on and the award ceremony has turned into a three-day festival at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport. We have been on board virtually from the very beginning and continue to support the Greentech Festival with innovative, resource-saving technology. To make a contribution – and to show what is currently technically possible in terms of the "green rationale".

Resource-saving mobility, sustainable consumption and a future-proof lifestyle are currently major topics of discussion in society. The Greentech Festival was initiated to advance the change to more sustainable behaviour and to make sure that it is implemented in real life. It is a logical development of the GreenTec Awards, which were founded in 2008. The idea of the initiators was to create a fitting public platform for innovative projects that advance the cause of environmental protection and resource conservation.

Mini-hydroelectric power plants, emission-free flights, the Joulia shower drain or the Paul water-backpack, the recycling of plastic waste from oceans and waterways, drying laundry with solar heat, a real-time carpooling network, balcony bees, organic straws, the Fairphone or house-building with waste paper – in previous years well-known corporations and bright idea developers came up with some pioneering solutions in terms of sustainability. One of the flagship projects is Car2Go: the car-sharing principle was presented as a concept in 2010, won an award and is now successful throughout Germany.

In October 2018 the entrepreneurs Marco Voigt and Sven Krüger – the initiators of the "environmental Oscars" – joined forces with former Formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg and came up with the idea for the festival with the aim of gaining an even more international audience for green developments. "Celebrate Change" is the slogan for the first Greentech Festival, which will be held at Berlin Tempelhof from 23 to 25 May 2019: "The aim is to create a global platform. We want the Greentech Festival to present the best green technologies and the coolest ideas to the whole world. And in a way that nobody has seen before," says Nico Rosberg.

Exhibition, congress and award ceremony – the different facets of the festival

The festival aims to encourage a new, positive attitude to change and to arouse more enthusiasm for green technologies. Whether mobility, energy, research and science, the latest food trends, sustainable lifestyle products or the success of environmental activists, artists and celebrities – it intends to give a platform to such innovations from all walks of life.

And the organisers want the festival itself to be so diverse: Greentech Exhibition is the largest exhibition of green technology to date. The Green Leaders Conference will welcome top-drawer entrepreneurs and radical thinkers – and the Green Awards are the crowning ceremony for prize-winning projects.

One partner of the Greentech Festivals is "Formula E", which will stage the 2019 "Berlin E-Prix" on the festival site. Nico Rosberg, who won the 2018 "Entrepreneur of the Year" award, supports sustainable projects in the field of mobility and has invested in Formula E. Besides watching the race, spectators can also experience the cars of the future at close hand.

Clever use of technology for higher energy efficiency and exciting jury participation

We support the Greentech Festival as a sponsor of the award show – but above all, we want to demonstrate that even well-attended events can be realised in a sustainable manner with the appropriate lighting, audio and video equipment. We use spotlights with energy-saving LED technology – for example on the "Green Carpet", where high-quality Fresnel lenses create ideal lighting conditions for photography. State-of-the-art laser projectors are our choice for impressive, high-contrast video mapping together with advanced loudspeaker systems to ensure efficiency on the sound side. As always, our technicians demonstrate that energy efficiency can still be increased even further by the clever use of sophisticated equipment.

To us, sustainability always means recruiting the crew from a local pool of employees, a principle we have adhered to since the beginning of our continuous and successful collaboration when the prize was awarded at Hamburg's Curio-Haus in 2011. Under the name "CleanTech Media Award", the ceremony took place in the Green Capital of the year – and, in our role as the venue's service partner, we ensured that the technical side of the event ran without a hitch. Following on from that, the VKP agency organised the award show and brought us on board as a technical consultant during the conceptual design and bid phase. For the following ceremonies in Munich and Berlin, implementation of the technical concept was added to our brief.

In addition to these activities, we are also involved in evaluating the submissions as a member of the jury. The interdisciplinary committee judges the ideas in terms of their contribution to preserving the environment, their level of innovation and, above all, in terms of their viability.