Recycled Orchestra

What it is

People build musical instruments out of objects headed for the bin: plastic bottles, cardboard tubes, old pans, metal tins, fruit crates. They can bring them from home too. With those instruments the group plays together, guided by our trainers.

Ecological and musical team building

How do you combine team building, music and ecology? Here’s an idea for playing percussion without cutting down a tree: the Recycled Orchestra.

In recent years more and more companies have tried new ways of improving how their people collaborate and of building a working environment that holds together and motivates, while at the same time sending a positive message about the environment. One of the more innovative and creative of them is to create a recycled orchestra that combines music, art and recycling into a single absorbing experience.

Music-based team building activities are enjoyable and effective at developing team spirit. Over the years we’ve found several ways of getting groups of managers who had never picked up an instrument to play together: Lip Dub, Corporate Orchestra, Corporate Song. The results have always been remarkable, though at a cost worth looking at. The genre beginners tend to play is percussion, and percussion instruments are made out of wood. So today we’re highlighting the formats that spare the trees without losing any of the pleasure or the effectiveness of musical team building. In the Recycled Orchestra the participants create their instruments out of discarded objects and produce a genuine rhythm.

Recycled Orchestra and corporate social responsibility

Taking part in this event, and building an orchestra that plays recycled instruments, has a positive effect inside the company and the team, and a considerable positive influence on how the environment is seen and on corporate social responsibility.

By using recycled materials to make instruments, the participants get to understand how much recycling and reducing waste matter. And running an event of this kind demonstrates the company’s commitment to sustainability and to CSR, which improves how the company is seen by its own people, by clients and by the community.

Recycled instruments: everyday objects

One of the more interesting things underneath a recycled orchestra is the possibility of using as instruments objects that would otherwise have been thought of as rubbish. It shows how practically anything can become an instrument with a bit of creativity and ingenuity.

Plastic bottles, cardboard tubes, old pots and pans, metal tins and even old fruit crates can all be turned into instruments. Participants can bring them from home themselves and use them to create melodies and rhythms, bringing to life, with the help of our master trainers, a musical performance that is unique and genuinely moving.

That ability to turn waste into a useful resource matters a great deal for the environment too. Recycling objects reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfill, and so reduces the company’s environmental impact. And promoting a culture of recycling and reuse helps build awareness among a company’s people about sustainable development and social responsibility.

An experience that pulls people in

The participants get to use their creativity and their imagination to make unique, personal instruments out of recycled materials. As we said, the activity also stimulates problem solving and cooperation between the people taking part, who have to work together to make instruments that function and that sound good together.

Once the instruments are built, the participants come together into a single remarkable orchestra. The musical performance that results is always moving and memorable, and it’s the product of teamwork, of creativity and of the collaboration between the people who made it.

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Discovering the pleasure of music and rhythm

One option is to carry on with our percussion formats, but using unconventional, recycled, improvised instruments. That way experiential training through music also leaves room for respecting the environment, for using recyclable materials and for caring about ecology.

Besides the Recycled Orchestra there’s another ecological musical format, one that needs no instruments at all: Body Percussion, playing our own bodies as an instrument, with no tree cut down anywhere. Team building that builds team spirit and teaches respect for nature at the same time.

Our attention to the environment doesn’t stop there: Crazy Car Race and Carton Boat are built from salvaged materials too, and in general we try to avoid waste in everything we set up.