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Teenage Wasteland – The Rise Of Throwaway Festival Culture

16th May 2014

Looking forward to this year’s festival season already? Planning out what you’re going to be taking with you? Well you might also want to give a bit of thought to what you could take home, as a new joint study by waste campaign group, Love Your Tent and Buckinghamshire New University has been released today and reveals some startling home truths about the amount of waste we’re creating at our favourite summer events.

The survey took a look into festival-attendees behaviour and attitudes, highlighting the huge negative impact on festival sustainability. As a result of their findings, Love Your Tent are now asking festival organisers to sign up to a 10% reduction agreement in campsite waste year on year.

We’ve all witnessed the carnage at the end of a long weekend and most of us will have felt the temptation to throw in the towel and leave a few items behind, but this might change your mind; the survey has revealed that campsite wastes now contribute to a staggering 86% of total music festival waste, while 71% of this waste caused lasting land damage to the native flora of the festival sites.

With over 6.5 million people last year attending a festival or live music event in the UK alone, are we facing an epidemic of environmental apathy in the music community? Cheap tents and an increasingly fickle attitude towards waste in society could be partly to blame, with just under half of those surveyed paying less than £75, and just over half saying they left their tent because it was broken. Only 28% would accept an increase in the price of a festival to include the disposal of their tent.

Sustainable event management/festival expert and Head of Department, Music & Event Management at Bucks New University, Teresa Moore, pointed to the rapid rise of the Eastern European festival as contributing to an exponential growth in the problem, with many now dealing with campsite waste for the first time.

“What we found confirms a growing problem which is not confined just to the UK” Moore said about the survey, “As tent prices continue to fall, more cheap tents are discarded at festivals. It’s time for retailers to take their share of their responsibility and work with event organisers to tackle this problem.”

The Isle of Wight Festival have been an early advocate of change, launching their ‘RESPECT’ campsite in 2012 to give consumers the opportunity of an almost VIP camping experience for free, upon signing their TENT COMMANDMENTS, a code of practise meaning that RESPECT is left without waste.

Isle of Wight Festival organiser, John Giddings added, “audiences leaving stuff behind is an issue us organisers have been dealing with for many years and the Bucks survey shows it’s a worsening problem. Supporting the Love Your Tent campaign has allowed us to offer a real alternative for campers who are fed up with wading through waste to get to and from their tents each day. We know there is a real market for a sustainable camping experience and we want to be at the forefront of that change.”

To support the campaign you can find Love Your Tent on Facebook and Twitter and use the hashtag #JustTakeItHome