How Pallas upcycles stage banners into tote bags for its merch stand

Berlin's Pallas festival has become a reference point in European electronic music for the way it treats its own waste as raw material. Held at the E-Werk, the event brings together labels, crews and audiences across multiple stages, and it finishes each edition by asking a simple question: what happens to all the printed fabric, vinyl and mesh that hung above the crowd?

One answer is now visible at the merchandise stand. The large-format stage banners that frame performers during the festival are cut down, stitched and printed into sturdy tote bags. A banner that began its life as a six-metre wrap above the main room can end up carrying a jacket, a record sleeve or a bundle of zines home. The project is small, but it has become one of the most photographed details of the festival and a useful case study in circular design for live events.

Why tote bags and not just recycling

Tote bags sit at an interesting intersection of fashion, utility and messaging. Pallas could have sent the banners to a standard textile recycling stream, where they would have been shredded into industrial felt or insulation. Instead, the team chose a route that keeps the original printed graphics visible, and turns a single-use item into something a person wants to keep using.

In Australia, where festival-goers at events like Laneway, Meredith and Golden Plains tend to arrive armed with a tote anyway, that logic resonates strongly. Many of the country's biggest music events now treat the tote as a default giveaway, and a bag made from a real stage banner carries an extra layer of meaning. It is not just branded merchandise; it is a fragment of a specific night, with the typography, colour palette and stage sponsor still legible on the canvas.

The decision to use banners as the source material was also practical. The E-Werk stages are wrapped in large-format PVC and mesh printed at high resolution, and these materials are notoriously hard to recycle through municipal systems. Pallas's approach sidesteps that bottleneck by extending the useful life of a printed surface without needing to break it down into raw fibre.

Collecting the banners once the lights come up

The work begins in the hours after the closing set, while the venue still hums with riggers, drivers and lighting technicians. Stage crew strip the printed skins from the trusses, fold them into labelled crates and move them to a holding area backstage. Each banner is tagged with the stage name, the artist it was associated with and the date of the print run, so the upcycling team can later match the material to its sonic context.

The process is intentionally meticulous. Banners that have been damaged by weather, beer spills or stage pyrotechnics are separated from those in good condition, and the team keeps detailed notes about which prints can be cut into large panels and which are best reserved for smaller accessories. Pallas has shared guidance on this kind of post-event sorting, and the same approach is now being studied by sustainability officers at events in Sydney and Melbourne who are trying to formalise their own backstage waste streams.

In practical terms, a banner that spent a weekend above the main room might be re-stitched into roughly forty to sixty standard tote bags, depending on the size of the print and the seam allowance. Smaller mesh banners, which are often used for sponsor loops, are reserved for limited runs and one-off designs.

Inside the transformation workshop

Once the banners reach the workshop, they are wiped down, air-dried and laid out on long cutting tables. Designers mark out the panels by hand, choosing which sections of the original artwork will become the front, back or bottom of each bag. The seams are reinforced with bonded nylon thread, and the handles are cut from a heavier grade of the same printed material, so each tote reads as a single continuous object rather than a patchwork.

The construction is deliberately robust. Pallas treats these bags as everyday carriers rather than fragile souvenirs, and the goal is for them to survive years of supermarket runs, library hauls and, in the case of the Australian market, a few summers of Bunnings car-park trips. Each bag is finished with a small interior label that lists the stage and year of origin, which functions as a quiet authentication mark for collectors.

The team has also experimented with heat-pressed detailing, water-based inks and natural dye accents, particularly for bags that are made in collaboration with specific labels. Some editions use only the back of the original banner, leaving the front pristine and ready for archival storage. A handful of leftover offcuts are kept aside for repairs, so a torn handle can be replaced without retiring the whole bag.

Design choices and label collaborations

The visual identity of the tote range is handled by a rotating group of designers drawn from the same Berlin labels that programme the festival. Each season the team releases a small catalogue of colourways, with at least one bag tied to a specific stage, artist or crew. Recent editions have included bags made from the banners of a Berghain-affiliated label's takeover night, and a quieter run drawn from the ambient room, which used a softer mesh print in faded greys and ochres.

The collaboration model mirrors how smaller Sydney collectives and Brisbane-based crews handle their own merch drops, where the artwork carries as much weight as the music. Pallas designers often pull specific phrases, stage graphics or sponsor loops from the original print and use them as the focal point of the bag, rather than adding new branding on top. The result feels like a poster that has been gently re-engineered rather than a corporate product.

A small number of bags are also produced as part of the festival's NFT exhibition, where the physical tote is sold alongside a corresponding digital artwork. This pairing has proven popular with collectors who want both a wearable object and a verifiable digital record, and the digital exhibition space gathers the NFT editions and the artwork that has grown up around the physical bags.

How the bags perform at the merch stand

Selling the totes at the merchandise stand is where the project meets its audience. Prices are kept close to standard artist merch, and the team has resisted the temptation to charge a premium for sustainability storytelling alone. Bags are displayed flat, hung on simple wooden rails or stacked in crates, and the staff are briefed to talk through the origin of each print with anyone curious enough to ask.

Reception has been strong. Festival-goers who recognise the original banner from a particular stage tend to buy those bags first, and the limited runs based on a single night often sell out within a few hours. Australian audiences who travel to Berlin for shows have reported bringing bags back to share with friends in Melbourne and Brisbane, where the upcycling story travels faster than the bag itself.

The merch stand is also where people raise practical questions: how to clean the bag, whether the print will fade, and whether the same process could be applied to banners at Australian events. The Pallas team has been generous with answers, and the project has become an informal case study for promoters who are trying to convince their own sponsors that printed material does not have to be a write-off after the lights go down.

A template for circular festival design

The Pallas tote project has implications well beyond the E-Werk. It shows that large printed surfaces, usually treated as single-use waste, can be redirected into a small, profitable and narratively rich product line. Other festivals looking at similar schemes will need to plan the sorting, the workshop relationship and the merch stand story well in advance, and they will need to accept that not every bag will be perfect.

For Australian promoters, the most useful lesson is the coordination between stage crew, designers and the merch team. A banner that is stripped carelessly cannot be turned into a clean panel, and a workshop that receives unlabelled material cannot tell one stage from another. The festival has documented its workflow in enough detail that producers in Adelaide and Perth have begun to adapt it for smaller rooms, and there is growing interest in applying the same logic to local event signage as well as to stage banners. Anyone curious about running a similar scheme can contact the organisers directly.

The broader lesson is unglamorous but useful. A tote bag is a small thing, and a stage banner is even smaller in the overall waste ledger of a festival. What makes the Pallas project work is not the bag itself, but the chain of decisions that turn a printed surface into something a person keeps, repairs and uses for years after the music has stopped. A well-made tote, sold at cost and carrying the visible trace of a specific night, may be the most quietly radical piece of merchandise on sale at any festival.