Think article made me a bit sad - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-48184756
We live quite close to Boomtown and the mess afterward I still find shocking. I genuinely don't remember it being the same attitude to abandoning swathes of rubbish post festival in the late 80s.
I find it hard to reconcile this being the same youthful generation pushing the agenda with Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes. How did this happen? How did we to yo the stage where we have to retroactively educate people and change the marketing of shops to make people think about packing away their tent and rubbish and not just walking away from them? What is it about a festival environment that makes this socially acceptable when it isn't in normal life. Or is it the same as normal life but the population density is such that the behavior looks worse.
As for Jordan quoted at the bottom of the article whose tired little legs just find the thought of carrying his tent home to too daunting:-
After hearing that a tent is equivalent to hundreds of plastic cups, I feel bad for leaving the tent there now.
Did someone actually have to tell you that Jordan? Are you such a drooling moron that you couldn't work that out for yourself?
They say ‘Love the Land and Leave no Trace,
But you can’t be arsed
Cos you are off your face.
You’ve been partying for days,
But look at the state of the place.
An abandoned refugee camp;
They came, they trashed, they left.
All the litter for the pickers.
All the tat for the tatters.
All the food for the seagulls, if they could get it out of the packets.
All the boots in the car parks,
In almost every parking space.
All the trolleys broken in the race
To be first out the gates,
While the land fills up with our disgrace.
You make up lies to soothe you
Like we can recycle, upcycle, re-use.
Make a thousand go carts
Out of all the spare parts
And send them to migrants.
With sleeping bags, roll mats,
and beloved Indian blankets.
Abandoned vango tents,
and empty baggies dusted with ket.
Cookers and camping chairs.
Your funky shirts and his muddy flairs.
Someone will pick up the bits,
Cool boxes full of shit,
Who the hell does a dump,
In the middle of their tent?
A steaming monument to represent
the level of descent you underwent.
It’s not rocket surgery,
You were potty trained in nursery,
But you can buy more with your college bursary,
Buy one get one free in our disposable society.
While people are starving in a time of austerity,
lunching out your stuff ain’t donating to charity,
So lets’s get some clarity …
All the munters are knackered by Monday.
So why don’t the punters pack up on Sunday?
Put your stuff in the lock up
Party all night, ready to go at sun up
You can sleep easy on the bus.
They said ‘Love the Farm and Leave no Trace,
So have a bit of dignity
And tidy up the place.
We’ve been partying for days,
So respect the land and leave with grace.
They shouldn't let them leave without the shit they brought in with them!
Yup, does seem hard to get the message through to some of the kids. 😕
It is bonkers - I was at Glasto about five years ago and the two guys (in their 50s) in the tent next to us freely admitted they would be leaving all their kit and it was all brand new - a big 6 man tent, proper camp beds, sleeping bags etc. We were going to try to get it in our small car but had no space for it. Still, at least the stuff gets collected and redistributed overseas so it isn't exactly going into landfill - people are actively encouraged to at least pack the stuff away rather than just leave it to the festival team though.
We live quite close to Boomtown and the mess afterward I still find shocking. I genuinely don’t remember it being the same attitude to abandoning swathes of rubbish post festival in the late 80s.
Errmmm, before all you middle aged Victor medrews get into full swing, it was your generation that did this
BBC News - The Malvern rave that ended all raves
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-40001484
Still, at least the stuff gets collected and redistributed overseas so it isn’t exactly going into landfill
That's part of the problem, it's not. I think a few festivals tried that but the sort of crap that gets left behind is useless for actually camping let alone living in a refugee camp. Those single skin tents barely protect your privacy whilst you catch an STI let alone from a cold night in Syria.
But most is going to landfill.
Guy a knew ran a group that collected, for charity, tents etc. It suddenly became a dog fight. Lots of groups wanting Access to the site to get free tickets then strip all valuables from the tents and leave with only good stuff to sell on. Very little going to charities. He reckoned it would have been easier just to bulldoze what was left.
But If they take it home and put it in a bin there it all still ends up in landfill.
This isn't a new thing, I first went to Glasto in 1995 and it looked exactly like that when we left.
The term 'Festival Tent' to me just means 'cheap enough to not worry about when someone falls on it' not a disposable although a lot end up that way.
I can't speak for other festivals, but I assume they work in a similar fashion - they employ legions of people who work (sometimes in exchange for a free ticket and food) to stay behind and tidy up. Usable tents are donated to homeless charities, which is apparently part of the reason why you see so many homeless people now, the tents make them more visible. Litter is collected and where possible recycled and 2 weeks after they event, it's like it never happened.
I would be nice if everyone took everything home with them, but they don't and it's not the end of the world as part of the staggering cost of festival tickets these days covers the tidy up.
There's a awful lot of perfectly good kitchens that end up in landfill too, just because home owners want the latest trend...
Tag the tents with an ultraviolet pen. Link the number to a register. Scan the leftovers, send a bill.
Usable tents are donated to homeless charities, which is apparently part of the reason why you see so many homeless people now,
Which would be fine but apparently there are less than 5000 rough sleepers in England ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45983897) and the article says there are 250,000 tents abandoned annually at festivals. So that's fifty festival tents for every rough sleeper. And if it was a genuine altruistic thing, your pack it up, making sure all the bits were there and donate it, not just stagger away from it. I view that as a guilt alleviating excuse.
People take their kitchens to festivals? Wow. Home comforts eh?
Look like a lot but not really. Maybe about 0.00000000000001% of what goes into landfill every year, if indeed it all does go to landfill. The photo is deliberately framed to make it look like a vast sea of waste to get everyone hot under the collar. Ultimately it keeps people employed picking this stuff up and tidying up, and the event itself generates a lot of revenue for the local economy, some of which could be invested into environmental schemes so the net impact on the environment can be reduced or eliminated, no reason why a synthetic tent can't be recycled. What happens to all the hundreds of thousands of plastic beer and prosecco cups and non-recyclable coffee cups, plastic cutlery that people use at these things?
However you'd have thought that a proper 'festival' tent would be a temporary thing made from some sort of material that is able to be more easily recycled or biodegradable...i don't know, something like those stringy bits you get in banana's but dried out and weaved into some from of fabric, or bamboo strands or something.
Errmmm, before all you middle aged Victor medrews get into full swing, it was your generation that did this
BBC News – The Malvern rave that ended all raves
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-40001484
/blockquote>Lots done wrong there (like trespass etc) but not seeing huge amounts of abandoned rubbish in that video).
As above, been that way for many years. The majority of young people are thoughtless ****s - always have been, probably always will be. I know I was (although at least we always brought the tents back!)
The photo is deliberately framed to make it look like a vast sea of waste to get everyone hot under the collar.
As I said in the OP - I live near the Boomtown site - no need for a photo, my eyes see what they see every year.
The majority of young people are thoughtless ****
Do young people actually go to these crappy festival things then?
Just to prove that nothing is new these days, look up pictures of the aftermath of Woodstock in 1969!!
Jordan sounds like a right little ****t. Oh your legs hurt & you’re too tired to carry your stuff back to the car.....
Carry it in, carry it out you self- entitled little oik!
GRRRR 😡
(Rant over..)
I think a few festivals tried that
They were actively promoting it at Glasto when I was there in 2015.
Jim Morrison's spirit guide in Wayne's world 2
And if it was a genuine altruistic thing, your pack it up, making sure all the bits were there and donate it, not just stagger away from it. I view that as a guilt alleviating excuse.
It's not a altruistic thing, it's a happy by-product of a selfish act. There's no justification here just a fact that's inconveniently opposed to the headline.
What happens to all the hundreds of thousands of plastic beer and prosecco cups and non-recyclable coffee cups, plastic cutlery that people use at these things?
Donington has a deposit scheme on beer cups, like 10p or something. It works well, you see kids wombling them with stacks metres high to make a few quid. If you plan on recycling your own then you need to keep a close eye on your empties or some bugger will be off with them.
IIRC someone told me all the abandoned crap from the Reading festival is gathered up to be given to either the homeless or sent off to 3rd world countries/disaster relief efforts.
It's not a stretch to imagine young Seraphina's abandoned popup tent and sleeping bag being put to better use somewhere in West Africa or the Middle east after she's had her post GCSE "experience".
If the middle-classes rampant throwaway culture creates some much needed temporary shelter elsewhere then there is an arguable benefit to it? Discuss...
Last time I went to Glastonbury, we just burned everything cause there was no firewood left! 😆
I don't really see the problem with this anyhow, you pay a fortune for festival tickets, it's up to the organisers to pay for the clean up from those tickets.
ho hum..
Who doesn't think there will be a mess after a 5 day bender with 100k people? 😆
This isn’t a new thing, I first went to Glasto in 1995 and it looked exactly like that when we left.
yep. Although to be fair me and my GFs and a few like-minded mates used in the 80s/early 90s volunteer/work there for Greenpeace litter-picking and/or stay with friends in the Green Future's/maker's areas. We didn't leave it like that. Not at all. Either used big communal canvas tents or took our own small tents home.
I remember smh and feeling like the whole shebang was at first a great idea but rapidly becoming an empty facade for spoiled/consumerist kids playing at being 'right on', with just a few hardcore 'do-gooders'* and environmentalists doing all the 'real' stuff out back. There was definitely an 'us vs them' vibe, and I remember older festival goers speaking about it. We (mates and I) sort of wanted to be like the older festivalgoers/people we met on site, because they seemed cool and considerate, with their wholefood, no-waste, semi-permanent camp setups and socially laid-back attitudes. Many of them were from self-reliance and sustainable living trends/culture from the late 60s into the late 70s. We few 80s kids were johnny-come-lately's with good intentions, yet the big, unstoppable urban and city-dwelling consumer-festy-tide coming behind was the shit we still see today. I remember the old dudes being (most often good-naturedly) skeptical,even cynical of our good-intentions, ie playing nice before we headed back to the conurbations to re-engage with car-culture and supermarkets.
But even back then most my mates back home took the piss out of me because I protested about them throwing litter out of car windows, and correctly disposed of my own litter - so the bar was set low for 'do-gooders' IMO.
Doing 'good' (or at least minimising harm) has long been deeply unfashionable in our culture.
But when did it get to the point that it became fashionable for so many to pay lip-service to doing better? Er, 1993? That sounds about right 🙁
Donington has a deposit scheme on beer cups, like 10p or something. It works well, you see kids wombling them with stacks metres high to make a few quid. If you plan on recycling your own then you need to keep a close eye on your empties or some bugger will be off with them.
At Lakefest they charge an extra £2 for your first pint, which covers the cost of the reusable (plastic) glass. You then use that one for the rest of the weekend. Works well.
If the middle-classes rampant throwaway culture creates some much needed temporary shelter elsewhere then there is an arguable benefit to it? Discuss…
As already stated we (fortunately only have a tiny fraction of the number of rough sleepers to the number of abandoned tents. And the needs of Syrian refugee families are not served in any meaningful need by £19.99 argos tents.
Still, at least the stuff gets collected and redistributed overseas so it isn’t exactly going into landfill – people are actively encouraged to at least pack the stuff away rather than just leave it to the festival team though.
No, the tents don't get carefully packed up and given to homeless people or refugees, they are too badly made for that.
The dumping festival-goers and the mountain bikers who scatter PET drink bottles along their trails are just proof of the hypocrisy of the virtue-signallers who pretend to care about their planet.
convert
Subscriber
Think article made me a bit sad – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-48184756
We live quite close to Boomtown and the mess afterward I still find shocking. I genuinely don’t remember it being the same attitude to abandoning swathes of rubbish post festival in the late 80s.
First festivals I went to were in the early 90s, and it was messier then than it is now.
I think it gets overlooked that a lot of the kit people use for festivals is intentionally shit and disposable. I have a pretty excellent little tent that I've used for dozens of festivals, but the chances of your stuff getting damaged is pretty high, and an expensive tent invites thieves too. So a huge number, and especially the younger folks, are there in argos tents and the like and carrying everything in ikea bags and basically minimising their costs and their potential losses. None of that's sustainable, whether you take it home or not.
(one of the reasons I could keep mine going, is that I salvaged a load of bags, pegs, groundsheets, even poles and bits of tent over the years to replace worn out or damaged parts of mine)
And when your tent leaks all weekend and your sleeping bag is too cold and everything's covered in mud and you've been paying £5 for a deathburger on top of your £200 for one of the big ones, not only are you not going to want to use it again, you're not going to give too much of a shit about the cost of cleanup, since you've already paid it.
One thing that really bothered me though was when Leeds/Reading introduced their tent disposal points- lovely simple idea, every field had a place you could ditch a packed up tent. And volunteers were clearing up abandoned tents too. And people were actually slashing or burning or jumping on their tents immediately before leaving, literally to stop that from happening. WTF?
And yeah the people that you see abandoning expensive kit are mostly older- for the simple reason, the younger people don't generally have that in the first place.
Last time I went to Glastonbury, we just burned everything cause there was no firewood left! 😆
I don’t really see the problem with this anyhow, you pay a fortune for festival tickets, it’s up to the organisers to pay for the clean up from those tickets.
^ probably trolling?
If not - then you really, really don't get it. Campaign for cheaper tickets vs treat the land and air with contempt, like you're spoiled weapons-grade spoiled brats trapped in the bodies of adults?
Tickets are never so expensive that you get to rape the host. Except in bad horror movies.
As I said in the OP – I live near the Boomtown site – no need for a photo, my eyes see what they see every year.
Yep. Some 3 weeks after Boomtown had finished I cycled past the site and was shocked at the number of tents and rubbish still in situ. All organisors need to get a grip on this and stop pandering to the self-entitled, blinkered punters.
Malvern Rider
Member
Not trolling at all, just got plenty of experience of 5 day benders, and I know cleaning up is a fairly unreasonable thing to expect.
I'm a great advocate of leave no trace. in the context of a fenced of festival, it doesn't apply though.
Do young people actually go to these crappy festival things then?
Dez makes a good point, festivals are for middle-aged bellends as well as young ones.
I find it hard to reconcile this being the same youthful generation pushing the agenda with Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes.
Bit sanctimonious. Young people now are way more environmentally conscious than in my day. Not their fault that society has become so focused on throwaway products.
Not trolling at all
A few Qs then:
1. Do you advocate treating (managed) campsites with the same level of disrespect as you do music-festival sites? (Leave/dump/burn everything?)
Or do you 2. advocate treating managed campsites with the same respect that you claim to advocate for unfenced areas? (Leave no trace?)
3. Also, with regards to burning toxic materials on open fires, where does the 'fence' exist if not simply in your mind?
Tag the tents with an ultraviolet pen. Link the number to a register. Scan the leftovers, send a bill.
I'm sure some people would say that with the cost of festival entry (especially for camping) they are already paying for the clean up - when a ticket costs more than the camping gear, and the food and drink in the venue probably costs as much again I can see how someone thinks little of walking away, especially if they have to endure crappy facilities and a huge treck through mud to queue for an overcrowded bus to take them somewhere. I think this is seosamh77's point. Would I do it? No. But I'm not a typical festival goer. Bear in mind though that there's perhaps 50 tents in the picture from the OP. There were probably 500-1000 tents in the same area the night before. So its 0.5-1% of festival goers being lazy. Just the same as not every school child went on strike over the environment, not every young person left their shit behind. Its also possible that the "we recycle abandoned tents" message means they think they are doing a good thing by walking away.
I'm more concerned that the behaviour then gets replicated in places like Glen Etive because that's what people do when they have a weekend on the beer.
Malvern Rider
Member
Not trolling st allA few Qs then:
1. Do you advocate treating (managed) campsites with the same level of disrespect as you do music-festival sites? (Leave/burn every trace?)
Or do you 2. advocate treating managed campsites with the same respect that you claim to advocate for unfenced areas? (Leave no trace?)
3. Also, with regards to burning toxic materials on open fires, where does the ‘fence’ exist if not simply in your mind?
Campsites are different, they aren't set up to be specifically for the purpose of people going on a bender, festivals are.. They aren't the same thing.
As for burning stuff, I'm hardly doing it on an industrial scale, so why not...I don't see the moral conundrum that you seem to see there.
well, I've seen all ages leaving tents at festivals. It's not a thing that just teenagers do. In fact I've seen older folk leave waaay more, as they generally seem to need more "luxuries" to get a weekend camping. I know that most of the tents left at Glasto go straight to land fill, which is pretty depressing.
I used to have a nice little tent (in fact I think my Dad used it as well) but it got nicked! so I can see why people tend to buy a cheap one. I do think though, calling them Festival Tents doesn't help as it does suggest that it's a once only use, which is a bit daft.
I've never even considered that the 'festival tent' description might mean single use. Fine for summer use passing out in / being tripped over / broadly keeping the contents dry, but don't take them to Everest base camp because you'll die was always my understanding.
I’ve never even considered that the ‘festival tent’ description might mean single use.
Ditto, thought it was just a marketing tag to flog shit tents.
On another note, I do despair for the youth of today if they can't even handle three or four nights on the sesh and carrying their kit back to the car park without their poor little legs hurting.
Some sort of deposit could work for smaller fests, but it would be next to impossible at big fests like Glasto where you can't even walk between tents in some places. Bad weather makes it worse too; if you are stupid enough to be camping in a sea of mud for 5 days then any tent is going to be shot. Only thing to do is to make it less acceptable. That worked with pissing in the hedge which is much better now and just took a few piss police at key areas. So it means we need to see a lot more of these pictures to spread the guilt.
