After being strutted upon for two weeks by stars like Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johansson, Halle Berry and Robert De Niro, the legendary red carpets of the Cannes Film Festival are set for a second life thanks to an upcycling charity and some environmentally conscious designers.
The red carpets were replaced daily at the festival, which ended on 24 May, with organisers handing over 1.5 tonnes of fine red material to a non-profit organisation in the port city of Marseille.
The carpets now sit on pallets or in black waste bags in a warehouse used by the La Reserve des Arts in the deprived northern suburbs of Marseille where they are being sorted, cleaned and prepared for re-use.
Some of them have small holes – possibly a result of hosting all those towering stilettoes – while others have been marked by footsteps or scuffs.
Reduce waste
"By reconditioning them, we're helping to reduce the environmental impact of the event – something the festival is aware of," Jeanne Re, coordinator at La Reserve des Arts, told French news agency AFP during a visit on Wednesday.
The Cannes Film Festival has for several years drawn attention to its efforts to improve its carbon footprint and cut down on waste - with the red carpet being just one of their environmental goals.
"The frequency with which the red carpet changes has been divided by 3: almost 1,400 kg of material is thus saved per edition, which is 59 percent of the carpet’s traditional volume," the festival says on its website.
La Reserve des arts specialises in re-using or "upcycling" products used by the fashion, theatre or other entertainment industries, finding new lives for items that might otherwise have ended up as waste.
The approach helps to reduce landfill and is seen as a response to growing public concern about the volume of single-use items used to put on public events.
But some environmental groups believe so-called second-life policies can result in "greenwashing", leading organisers and companies to tout their recycling policies rather than focusing on reducing their overall consumption.
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Bucket hats and wine bottle bags
The Cannes carpet is being resold at just one euro a kilo, Re telling AFP that amounted to 33 cents per square metre – an "unbeatable" price.
She added that the goal was to make it "as accessible to as many of our members as possible".
Elsa Ramouni-Yordikian, an artist and member who has been using the red carpets for the last four years, told AFP she had used the material for handbags, bucket hats, glasses cases and even bags for wine bottles.
Some were "quite unique pieces", she said of her work with the charity Les Nippones.
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She recently showcased her creations made with the 2024 carpet in an exhibition in Marseille titled "Dress like a Movie Star".
"The fact that it comes from a famous festival and is recycled locally – that makes sense to us," she said.
Production of synthetic materials like the red carpets will "never stop, there will always be more, just like festivals and trade shows, so we need to find ways to give them new value", she said.
(with AFP)
