The Royal Danish Academy of Music

Complete waste solution tailored to an iconic building with aesthetically beautiful interiors

The Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM) is the country’s oldest and largest professional music education institution with around 500 students.

RDAM covers 18,000 m2 – including the Conservatory Concert Hall, considered one of the most beautiful in Denmark. The hall was designed by Vilhelm Lauritsen and inaugurated in 1945. Beautiful architecture created from unique materials requires a waste solution that can aesthetically blend into the interior design.

The Challenge

Waste sorting in beautiful surroundings

Many people move through RDAM daily – students, teachers, other staff, and guests. Working on a new waste solution therefore required a thorough mapping of user movement patterns as well as waste types and volumes.

The Academy wanted to remove the many individual and randomly placed waste bins and instead gather waste sorting at key points throughout the buildings. At the same time, they wanted a durable and efficient waste solution that could visually match the interior design. Additionally, parts of the solution needed to be wall‑mounted to avoid an existing issue where bins were being moved around and used as doorstops.

The Solution

The Royal Danish Academy of Music received a solution that met all needs

After obtaining quotes from three different suppliers, RDAM chose Bica waste sorting. Here, they received the right combination of sleek waste furniture with the right capacity and functional details such as soft‑close front doors, strong bag holders, and differentiated inlets. At the same time, the proposed solution could be wall‑mounted using simple brackets. In other words, a high‑quality indoor waste sorting solution with bins that were easy to clean and built to withstand daily use.

The solution included several different Bica models with various open inlets. Among them, Bica Model 869 with square, elongated, and round inlets. This setup sorts residual waste, paper, and plastic respectively. The differentiated inlets were intended to make the waste types more visually distinct. On the front door, a square pictogram in Danish was applied, and on the lid, a narrower pictogram in English to accommodate international users.

Future Expectations

The Academy expects even more correct sorting

Overall, students, staff, and guests have responded very positively to the Bica waste systems at RDAM. Sorting errors cannot be completely avoided, but their clear assessment is that a significant amount of waste is now being sorted correctly, and the volume of residual waste has decreased. RDAM continuously informs users about correct sorting via notice boards and the intranet. As part of their green transition, RDAMaims to minimize sorting errors as much as possible and is ready to initiate targeted initiatives if sorting does not progress as expected. At present, the solutions are functioning as intended.