Sorting cans between sets: what volunteering at Roskilde Festival is actually like

Every can, cup and glass at Roskilde Festival carries a deposit, "pant" in Danish. All week long, collectors roam the site picking them up and bring their hauls to sorting stations, where volunteers in gloves sort them by deposit level, count them out loud ("10A!", ten cans of level A), and load everything onto trucks. It is the festival's recycling system, and it runs on people like Maxi.

Maxi is a 23-year-old journalism graduate and photographer from Germany. We got talking through the photography: she reached out about shooting festivals, we run the Coda Collective, and one conversation led to another. Along the way it turned out she spends her Roskilde on the other side of the wristband, as one of the roughly 27,000 volunteers the festival runs on. That number is not a footnote, it is the business model. Roskilde is a non-profit, and the full profit is donated to initiatives for children and young people, 476 million DKK (around 64 million euros) since 1971. That mission is part of why we keep coming back. But we only ever see it from the photo pit, so we asked Maxi to show you the back of the house.

Ten cans of A

Her route in will sound familiar to every student who has ever stared at a festival ticket price. "I'd always wanted to see Kneecap and Little Simz live, and this was the perfect opportunity. As a student I couldn't really afford the festival ticket, so the volunteer option was fitting." Friends from her course in Denmark had volunteered the year before and loved it. Her friend and girlfriend picked the crew for all of them: the pant team, sorting the deposit cans that collectors bring in from across the site. Four shifts of eight hours, one of them from midnight to eight in the morning.

It is work, but not the kind that eats your festival. "I never overworked or tired myself out. Whenever we want, we can eat from the fridge and drink whatever we want." The scheduling is built around the music, not against it: volunteers can flag the artists they refuse to miss months in advance, and supervisors plan around them. Maxi's crew ran straight from Young Miko to a shift. Her moment of the festival, Little Simz, she watched with her girlfriend and a friend, exactly as planned.

The village behind the gates

Ask her what festivalgoers never see, and she doesn't mention the trucks or the sorting tables. "The friendships being made behind every food stall, entrance gate and pant station. And the dedication of the shift managers and supervisors."

Behind the scenes, the Danish festival turns out to be less Danish than it looks. Her shifts were Danish, Australian, British, Romanian, German, "and one language I couldn't identify." Breaks filled themselves with travel talk and swapped Google Maps lists; she found mutual acquaintances with strangers. "Volunteer camping is much more international than the normal camping."

And the non-profit part is not abstract to the people doing the work. "You're not working for a company or a brand; you know your work goes towards youth projects," Maxi says. "It also makes the work more easygoing. There are no strict shift breaks or strict authority, we all look out for each other." Her one-line version of the whole place: "Roskilde is like a village you're visiting for the first time but feel at home at instantly."

Three reasons, one warning

Her pitch for anyone who has never volunteered: the free festival ticket, the new friendships, and the volunteer camping, which she loved: clean, comfortable, one of the nicest corners of the whole site. Her honest warning: it is Denmark, and it can rain, which in her words can be "very yucky." So come prepared.

It didn't change the maths. Maxi and her crew have already registered for Roskilde 2027. Same station.

Credits

Maxi is also a photographer, find her work at @maxikingxx. Curious about volunteering at Roskilde? Start here. Or want to know more about festival photography yourself? Read our notes From the Pit or read more about the Coda Collective.