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Unfortunately, when thousands and thousands of people descend upon a field for a music festival, high volumes of waste are inevitable. So high, in fact, that quantifying it can be a little scary. It's estimated that UK music festivals produce around 23,500 tonnes of waste each year. To put that in perspective, that's around the same weight as 80 fully loaded Boeing 747s.

So, if your waste management company has landed a music festival contract this year, don't be worried - be prepared!

What waste are you dealing with?

Before your team gets anywhere near the festival, the first thing that you're going to need to do is find out exactly what sort of waste you are dealing with.

Below are some examples of the sort of waste that you might be dealing with at a festival:

The next question that should be on your mind: which of these materials are actually recyclable? Glass bottles and aluminium cans certainly are, but what about all the different kinds of plastics? What about the contaminated packaging? It's important to fully understand exactly what materials you will and won't be able to recycle before starting your waste management campaign, as this will allow you to properly plan for it.

How to think sustainably for your festival

One of the main waste problems that you will find at festivals is the sheer amount of non-recyclable plastics. Whether it's plastic straws, plastic bottles or polythene bags handed out by food and drinks stalls, all of this will mount up over the course of the weekend and end up in landfill.

That's why, before the festival, it's important to try and nip these things in the bud. Why not encourage the use of reusable bottles by positioning refill stations around the site? You could even suggest banning the sale of single-use coffee cups, and of course recyclable cardboard straws should be a simple enough change.

Encouraging the guests to dispose of their waste

It's all well and good having a recycling plan in place for your festival, but it's not always easy to get the guests to comply. That's why you need to make it as easy for them to dispose of their waste properly.

Start by setting up many waste stations throughout the festival, some for recyclables and some for general waste. The important thing here is to make sure that they're clearly labelled to make it as simple as possible for festival goers to get it right, regardless of the state they're in.
Brown Recycling is a leading waste management company in Stoke-on-Trent, offering all kinds of services from commercial waste disposal to skip hire. We know how to keep festival waste in check too; we got the V Festival contract a few years back! If you're interested in learning a little more about what we do, all you have to do is get in touch and a member of our team will be happy to advise you.
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Festival Waste Management | Brown Recycling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Unfortunately, when thousands and thousands of people descend upon a field for a music festival, high volumes of waste are inevitable. So high, in fact, that quantifying it can be a little scary. It's estimated that UK music festivals produce around 23,500 tonnes of waste each year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It looks like any other field - rolling green hummocks bordered by woodland and a handful of rural buildings. Dig down through the turf and scrape at the top soil, however, and another picture emerges. Amid the dirt, you will find aluminium beer can pull tabs, fragments of bottle glass and plastic.

But this is no ordinary rubbish. On this patch of ground 50 years ago, music history was made. This is Bethel, a small town in the southern foothills of New York's Catskill Mountains and the site of the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

More than 400,000 music fans and hippies gathered here in 1969 for what would become a legendary weekend of music and revelries. But the festival and its audience left another enduring legacy behind when the music ended - mountains of rubbish.

The trash cans provided by the organisers proved woefully inadequate for the huge numbers of people who turned up, as did the toilet facilities. Piles of bottles, beer cans, discarded sleeping bags, broken tents, plastic sheeting, newspapers and human waste were abandoned and trampled into the muddy quagmire.

"After three days of rain and mud, many just walked off and left clothing, sleeping bags and other items," says Maria O'Donovan, an archaeologist at Binghamton University in New York who has led an excavation project on the site to identify the site of key locations at the festival.

Surprisingly little remains of this huge sea of waste, but O'Donovan and her team found a distinctive smear of trash downhill, and soil patterns typically expected from an industrial-scale removal using heavy equipment.

It seems astonishing that an event so steeped in the environmental movement at the time should leave an environmental scar that is still visible 50 years later. But as one of the first big music festivals, Woodstock set the tone for many of those that would try to follow in its footsteps.
Jumbo problem
Waste is now one of the biggest problems facing modern music festivals. Each of the major music festivals in the US, such as Coachella, Stagecoach and Desert Trip, generate around 100 tonnes of solid waste every day, while an estimated 23,500 tonnes of waste are produced by music festivals in the UK each year - about the same as weight as 78 fully loaded Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets. To put that in perspective - the average household in the UK produces around one tonne of waste a year.

Most festivals employ armies of litter pickers to help clean up at the end of their events, and enormous waste management operations swing into action once the revellers go home. But Graca Gonçalves, a former environmental scientist at Nova University of Lisbon and one of the organisers of the Andanças Festival in Castelo de Vide, Portugal says the growing use of disposable plastics at festivals has been behind many of the waste problems large festivals struggle with. Drinks and food are sold in disposable plastic cups, bottles and food containers, along with enormous amounts of plastic cutlery. Festivalgoers discard wristbands, fancy dress clothing, glitter, ponchos, toiletries, sleeping bags, mats and tents all made from polymers that can persist in the environment for decades if not centuries.

As a result, many of the major festivals in the US and Europe are rethinking the impact they are having on the environment.

Most notably, Glastonbury has for the first time banned the sale of single-use plastic drinks bottles. The festival, which attracts around 200,000 people, sold more than a million plastic bottles in 2017. Audiences and artists will be encouraged to refill reusable water bottles. Soft drinks and water will also be sold in aluminium cans, which the festival says are easier to collect and recycle. It follows a ban on non-compostable plates, cups, straws and cutlery at previous Glastonbury festivals.

"In the last few years we've all begun to see how simply recycling plastic is not really a solution," explains Emily Eavis, co-organiser of Glastonbury and youngest daughter of the festival's founder, Michael Eavis. She says the festival is aiming to ban the sale of all single-use plastics on its site over the next two to three years. "We want to show everyone just what can be done if we all shift our mindset - we can change our behaviour and make a huge leap to going plastic free."
Zero tolerance
A number of other festivals have taken similar steps to remove single-use plastics from their events. Both Live Nation and all 61 members of the UK's Association of Independent Festivals have pledged to ban single-use plastics from their venues and sites by 2021.

Rainbow Serpent in Australia even goes as far as to stop the music several times over the weekend for " dancefloor clean ups". The music keeps playing if the ground is kept clean. But despite this and a number of other recycling initiatives, it saw the amount of waste it sent to landfill increase dramatically last year.

Switching to reusable cups, plates and cutlery helped Andanças Festival, which attracts 21,000 fans over the weekend it runs, produce just a fraction of the waste of other festivals, says Gonçalves.

Elsewhere, the DGTL Amsterdam festival in the Netherlands is aiming to become the world's first zero-waste music festival by 2020. They have already banned plastic cups and bottles, instead selling the audience a reusable cup or bottle they can bring back to the bar for refills. In 2017, DGTL's 20,000 attendees produced just 162kg of plastic waste.

But a closer look at analysis of DGTL's waste from 2017 reveals that the festival still has some way to go before it can reach its goal. Around 9.2 tonnes of rubbish was left by the audience, the bulk of which was paper and food. There was also 1.8 tonnes of plastic waste attributed to "construction" at the site that was incinerated after the festival ended.

Simply replacing disposable plastic cups and bottles with reusable ones may not be the solution, either.

Analysis conducted by the Public Waste Agency of Flanders, Ovam, shows that due to the extra material and energy needed to make a reusable polypropylene plastic cup, it must be refilled up to eight times before it has less of an environmental impact than a single-use cup made from the same material.

Things look better when reusable cups are compared to disposable containers made from Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or polystyrene, as they must only be refilled up to five times to be a greener option. But they must be reused between nine and 14 times before they cause less environmental harm than throw-away cardboard cups.

If combined with recycling, the impact can be reduced. In 2017 Festival Republic worked with a specialist recycling firm to help it deal with paper cups at its Leeds and Reading Festivals in the UK. By the end of the two events, 475,000 paper cups, weighing six tonnes, had been collected and recycled.
Bio solutions
The challenge of replacing plastic is finding an alternative that is safe, cost-efficient and better for the environment overall. One approach that has seen growing popularity at festivals in recent years has been to switch to so-called "bioplastic" cups, which are made from starch, cellulose or other materials extracted from plants and algae. But this too might not be the solution it first seems. These can vary widely in how biodegradable they are, often need to be put into industrial composting facilities before they break down properly and can contaminate traditional plastic recycling.

"Many of these alternative products that are being used to replace plastic are great, but the full lifecycle needs to be thought of by the organisers," warns Claire O'Neill, a director of A Greener Festival, a not-for-profit company that has been working with festivals around the world to help them become more sustainable. "If it is biodegradable, it needs to go somewhere that can process this kind of waste. If it ends up in the environment, it might cause just as many problems as normal plastic waste."

This tricky problem has led some to look for other, more innovative solutions. A UK-based team of engineers and designers called Skipping Rocks Lab have created a seaweed-based membrane that can be used to encapsulate liquids like water, energy drinks and sauces in bite-size morsels. The transparent pouches, which are created by chemically altering a substance called alginate that is extracted from brown seaweed, can be popped in the mouth and safely eaten whole.

"The skins don't have a very long life-span like plastic bottles, so it is best to create them at the location or event as they are needed," says Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, co-founder of Skipping Rocks. Currently the liquid has to be encapsulated in a portable machine about the size of a small fridge, but the firm has received backing from Sky Ocean Ventures to help it shrink the devices further so they can be used by food vendors.

The firm recently provided 30,000 drinks in edible capsules to runners at the London Marathon earlier this year, and has run a trial to put ketchup and other condiment sauces in seaweed sachets in a collaboration with takeaway firm Just Eat.

"We have also been working with a few festivals to put alcohol as well as water in our edible sachets to see what we can do in terms of scale," adds Gonzalez. "We can make them so they can be eaten but we can also do bigger sizes where the corner is torn off and the skin is discarded. It breaks down really quickly - in a warm environment our skins disappear in about two weeks."
Tent discontent
One area of festival waste that has been largely neglected up until now is more visible and controversial: tents. Every year more than 250,000 tents are abandoned at music festivals across the UK.

Many blame the growing availability of cheap, pop-up "festival tents" that are marketed by supermarkets and online retailers like Amazon. Costing just tens of dollars, cheap tents and other camping equipment rarely stands up to more than a weekend of use and contribute to the idea that they are throwaway items to be discarded after being used once.

Research by environmental charities suggests that manufacturing a 3.5kg tent produces the equivalent of 25kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the average tent is mostly made of plastic equivalent to 8,750 straws. The complex mix of different materials used to make tents means they are almost impossible to recycle.

The Association of Independent Festivals in the UK is trying to bring about change, urging retailers to stop selling festival tents as if they are single use, and instead asking attendees to take their collapsible accommodation home with them.

One idea to reduce this campsite waste is to offer festival-goers tents that can be recycled or composted. KarTent offers fully recyclable two-person tents made entirely from cardboard. The Amsterdam-based company will pitch the tents for its customers and then take it down so it can be reused or recycled. Unfortunately, the creators warn that the thick cardboard will become sodden in heavy downpours.

Amanda Campbell and James Molkenthin, two design students at University College London, have set up a company called Comp-a-Tent that allows festivalgoers to order a pop-up tent that they can pick up at the festival, and then take home or sell back at the end. The idea, says Molkenthin, is to encourage users to look after the tents and return them so they can be used again and again. "Whilst many people believe that some magic organisation goes round and saves them for the homeless or scout group or recycling, the truth is that only happens to a couple hundred tents," he says. "The plastic in the tents will take hundreds if not thousands of years to break down." They are due to trial the scheme at Boomtown Fair in Hampshire, England, later this summer.
Reuse and recycle
Similar services that will pitch the tent for you and provide other camping equipment are being offered at a number of festivals this year. Other schemes have tried to turn the piles of broken, slashed and soiled tents left behind into other goods, such as rucksacks or clothing.

The Roskilde Festival in Denmark, which attracts 130,000 visitors over eight days, has tried a different approach, creating distinct campsite communities where those staying shoulder the responsibility for keeping their area clean and sustainable.

Some groups are also pushing for donation points at festival site exits, which will allow campers to give their unwanted tents to charities that can put them to good use.

For instance, at the Green Man Festival in the Brecon Beacons this year, audiences will be encouraged to donate any uneaten food and unwanted camping equipment to Help Refugees so it can be sent to help migrants in Calais, France.

"At the end of every event there are thousands of perfectly good tents that have just been abandoned and are just going in the skip," says Matthew Wedge Roberts from Fwrd Together, a charity that salvages tents from festivals so they can be used to help refugees. For the past three years they have been working with local and national charities such as Help Refugees to collect tents, sleeping bags, sleeping mats and wellington boots from festival sites so they can be reused. At this month's Download festival in Leeds, Wedge Roberts says they managed to fill their vans with 250 pairs of wellies, 60 camping chairs and 50 airbeds in a couple of hours.

Back in Bethel, Maria O'Donovan and her team recovered just a small collection of items - including pull tabs, plastic fragments and aluminium foil - from the small patch of ground they excavated close to where the main stage stood during Woodstock in 1969. Their value as archaeological artefacts may be questionable, but they carry an important message, she says.

"The things people throw out have great value for us since they provide insight into what people did, how they acted, what they thought about," says O'Donovan. "Concert facilities, including trash cans, proved completely inadequate when nearly half-a-million people showed up. In the main stage area, they brought in bulldozers and just loaded the trash into trucks for removal."

Modern festivals should, and arguably can, do better.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Music, Culture, Capital, Future and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The people fighting the war on waste at music festivals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It looks like any other field - rolling green hummocks bordered by woodland and a handful of rural buildings. Dig down through the turf and scrape at the top soil, however, and another picture emerges. Amid the dirt, you will find aluminium beer can pull tabs, fragments of bottle glass and plastic.

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Handy checklist here!

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Festival organisers include sound systems, lanterns and drones on their list of unfavourable items.

Glastonbury 2017 is edging closer, with the balance payment window closing this Friday (7 April).

While the festival has provided punters with a helpful list of what to bring to the event, as Somerset Live notes, they've also created a list of "what not to bring".

Most seriously, Nitrous oxide - otherwise known as laughing gas - is now officially banned at the festival, and is considered a "contraband good, under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 which came into force last month".

Elsewhere on the list of no-no's are are laser pens, fireworks or flares, recording or taping equipment and sound systems.

No animals are permitted to the festival, except for guide dogs.

As always, the event prohibits anything brought in glass bottles and warns festival-goers that even perfume will be confiscated if it's found on their person.

Despite their long list of prohibited items, the festival DOES recommend a load of things you should bring such as wellies, loo roll and contraception.

See the items on their "What Not To Bring" list and get the full details here:

Gazebos, which will prevent others from pitching their tent

Only food and alcohol for personal consumption - nothing to be sold on to others

Excess packaging that could be disposed of before you leave for the festival

No glass bottles - not even bottles for perfume or aftershave

You may be searched at the entrance for any items that may be used in an illegal or offensive manner - which will be confiscated. Persons suspected of carrying out illegal and/or offensive activities onsite may also be searched and face eviction.

No portable laser equipment or pens

No animals (Except registered guide dogs)

No sound systems, generators, sky lanterns or kites, unauthorised fireworks, or wax flares - Persons using fireworks will be evicted from site and materials confiscated.

No unauthorised tape recorders, professional film or video equipment are allowed onsite. Cameras for personal use are welcome

Drones - flying or filming with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or so-called drones) is not allowed on site before, during or after the Festival - and is prohibited by law.

No Nitrous oxide (laughing gas). As a contraband good, under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 which came into force earlier this year, this substance is banned at Glastonbury.

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What SHOULDN'T You Take To Glastonbury Festival This Year?

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Festival organisers include sound systems, lanterns and drones on their list of unfavourable items. Glastonbury 2017 is edging closer, with the balance payment window closing this Friday (7 April). While the festival has provided punters with a helpful list of what to bring to the event, as Somerset Live notes, they've also created a list of "what not to bring".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It looks like any other field - rolling green hummocks bordered by woodland and a handful of rural buildings. Dig down through the turf and scrape at the top soil, however, and another picture emerges. Amid the dirt, you will find aluminium beer can pull tabs, fragments of bottle glass and plastic.

But this is no ordinary rubbish. On this patch of ground 50 years ago, music history was made. This is Bethel, a small town in the southern foothills of New York's Catskill Mountains and the site of the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

More than 400,000 music fans and hippies gathered here in 1969 for what would become a legendary weekend of music and revelries. But the festival and its audience left another enduring legacy behind when the music ended - mountains of rubbish.

The trash cans provided by the organisers proved woefully inadequate for the huge numbers of people who turned up, as did the toilet facilities. Piles of bottles, beer cans, discarded sleeping bags, broken tents, plastic sheeting, newspapers and human waste were abandoned and trampled into the muddy quagmire.

"After three days of rain and mud, many just walked off and left clothing, sleeping bags and other items," says Maria O'Donovan, an archaeologist at Binghamton University in New York who has led an excavation project on the site to identify the site of key locations at the festival.

Surprisingly little remains of this huge sea of waste, but O'Donovan and her team found a distinctive smear of trash downhill, and soil patterns typically expected from an industrial-scale removal using heavy equipment.

It seems astonishing that an event so steeped in the environmental movement at the time should leave an environmental scar that is still visible 50 years later. But as one of the first big music festivals, Woodstock set the tone for many of those that would try to follow in its footsteps.
Jumbo problem
Waste is now one of the biggest problems facing modern music festivals. Each of the major music festivals in the US, such as Coachella, Stagecoach and Desert Trip, generate around 100 tonnes of solid waste every day, while an estimated 23,500 tonnes of waste are produced by music festivals in the UK each year - about the same as weight as 78 fully loaded Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets. To put that in perspective - the average household in the UK produces around one tonne of waste a year.

Most festivals employ armies of litter pickers to help clean up at the end of their events, and enormous waste management operations swing into action once the revellers go home. But Graca Gonçalves, a former environmental scientist at Nova University of Lisbon and one of the organisers of the Andanças Festival in Castelo de Vide, Portugal says the growing use of disposable plastics at festivals has been behind many of the waste problems large festivals struggle with. Drinks and food are sold in disposable plastic cups, bottles and food containers, along with enormous amounts of plastic cutlery. Festivalgoers discard wristbands, fancy dress clothing, glitter, ponchos, toiletries, sleeping bags, mats and tents all made from polymers that can persist in the environment for decades if not centuries.

As a result, many of the major festivals in the US and Europe are rethinking the impact they are having on the environment.

Most notably, Glastonbury has for the first time banned the sale of single-use plastic drinks bottles. The festival, which attracts around 200,000 people, sold more than a million plastic bottles in 2017. Audiences and artists will be encouraged to refill reusable water bottles. Soft drinks and water will also be sold in aluminium cans, which the festival says are easier to collect and recycle. It follows a ban on non-compostable plates, cups, straws and cutlery at previous Glastonbury festivals.

"In the last few years we've all begun to see how simply recycling plastic is not really a solution," explains Emily Eavis, co-organiser of Glastonbury and youngest daughter of the festival's founder, Michael Eavis. She says the festival is aiming to ban the sale of all single-use plastics on its site over the next two to three years. "We want to show everyone just what can be done if we all shift our mindset - we can change our behaviour and make a huge leap to going plastic free."
Zero tolerance
A number of other festivals have taken similar steps to remove single-use plastics from their events. Both Live Nation and all 61 members of the UK's Association of Independent Festivals have pledged to ban single-use plastics from their venues and sites by 2021.

Rainbow Serpent in Australia even goes as far as to stop the music several times over the weekend for " dancefloor clean ups". The music keeps playing if the ground is kept clean. But despite this and a number of other recycling initiatives, it saw the amount of waste it sent to landfill increase dramatically last year.

Switching to reusable cups, plates and cutlery helped Andanças Festival, which attracts 21,000 fans over the weekend it runs, produce just a fraction of the waste of other festivals, says Gonçalves.

Elsewhere, the DGTL Amsterdam festival in the Netherlands is aiming to become the world's first zero-waste music festival by 2020. They have already banned plastic cups and bottles, instead selling the audience a reusable cup or bottle they can bring back to the bar for refills. In 2017, DGTL's 20,000 attendees produced just 162kg of plastic waste.

But a closer look at analysis of DGTL's waste from 2017 reveals that the festival still has some way to go before it can reach its goal. Around 9.2 tonnes of rubbish was left by the audience, the bulk of which was paper and food. There was also 1.8 tonnes of plastic waste attributed to "construction" at the site that was incinerated after the festival ended.

Simply replacing disposable plastic cups and bottles with reusable ones may not be the solution, either.

Analysis conducted by the Public Waste Agency of Flanders, Ovam, shows that due to the extra material and energy needed to make a reusable polypropylene plastic cup, it must be refilled up to eight times before it has less of an environmental impact than a single-use cup made from the same material.

Things look better when reusable cups are compared to disposable containers made from Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or polystyrene, as they must only be refilled up to five times to be a greener option. But they must be reused between nine and 14 times before they cause less environmental harm than throw-away cardboard cups.

If combined with recycling, the impact can be reduced. In 2017 Festival Republic worked with a specialist recycling firm to help it deal with paper cups at its Leeds and Reading Festivals in the UK. By the end of the two events, 475,000 paper cups, weighing six tonnes, had been collected and recycled.
Bio solutions
The challenge of replacing plastic is finding an alternative that is safe, cost-efficient and better for the environment overall. One approach that has seen growing popularity at festivals in recent years has been to switch to so-called "bioplastic" cups, which are made from starch, cellulose or other materials extracted from plants and algae. But this too might not be the solution it first seems. These can vary widely in how biodegradable they are, often need to be put into industrial composting facilities before they break down properly and can contaminate traditional plastic recycling.

"Many of these alternative products that are being used to replace plastic are great, but the full lifecycle needs to be thought of by the organisers," warns Claire O'Neill, a director of A Greener Festival, a not-for-profit company that has been working with festivals around the world to help them become more sustainable. "If it is biodegradable, it needs to go somewhere that can process this kind of waste. If it ends up in the environment, it might cause just as many problems as normal plastic waste."

This tricky problem has led some to look for other, more innovative solutions. A UK-based team of engineers and designers called Skipping Rocks Lab have created a seaweed-based membrane that can be used to encapsulate liquids like water, energy drinks and sauces in bite-size morsels. The transparent pouches, which are created by chemically altering a substance called alginate that is extracted from brown seaweed, can be popped in the mouth and safely eaten whole.

"The skins don't have a very long life-span like plastic bottles, so it is best to create them at the location or event as they are needed," says Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, co-founder of Skipping Rocks. Currently the liquid has to be encapsulated in a portable machine about the size of a small fridge, but the firm has received backing from Sky Ocean Ventures to help it shrink the devices further so they can be used by food vendors.

The firm recently provided 30,000 drinks in edible capsules to runners at the London Marathon earlier this year, and has run a trial to put ketchup and other condiment sauces in seaweed sachets in a collaboration with takeaway firm Just Eat.

"We have also been working with a few festivals to put alcohol as well as water in our edible sachets to see what we can do in terms of scale," adds Gonzalez. "We can make them so they can be eaten but we can also do bigger sizes where the corner is torn off and the skin is discarded. It breaks down really quickly - in a warm environment our skins disappear in about two weeks."
Tent discontent
One area of festival waste that has been largely neglected up until now is more visible and controversial: tents. Every year more than 250,000 tents are abandoned at music festivals across the UK.

Many blame the growing availability of cheap, pop-up "festival tents" that are marketed by supermarkets and online retailers like Amazon. Costing just tens of dollars, cheap tents and other camping equipment rarely stands up to more than a weekend of use and contribute to the idea that they are throwaway items to be discarded after being used once.

Research by environmental charities suggests that manufacturing a 3.5kg tent produces the equivalent of 25kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the average tent is mostly made of plastic equivalent to 8,750 straws. The complex mix of different materials used to make tents means they are almost impossible to recycle.

The Association of Independent Festivals in the UK is trying to bring about change, urging retailers to stop selling festival tents as if they are single use, and instead asking attendees to take their collapsible accommodation home with them.

One idea to reduce this campsite waste is to offer festival-goers tents that can be recycled or composted. KarTent offers fully recyclable two-person tents made entirely from cardboard. The Amsterdam-based company will pitch the tents for its customers and then take it down so it can be reused or recycled. Unfortunately, the creators warn that the thick cardboard will become sodden in heavy downpours.

Amanda Campbell and James Molkenthin, two design students at University College London, have set up a company called Comp-a-Tent that allows festivalgoers to order a pop-up tent that they can pick up at the festival, and then take home or sell back at the end. The idea, says Molkenthin, is to encourage users to look after the tents and return them so they can be used again and again. "Whilst many people believe that some magic organisation goes round and saves them for the homeless or scout group or recycling, the truth is that only happens to a couple hundred tents," he says. "The plastic in the tents will take hundreds if not thousands of years to break down." They are due to trial the scheme at Boomtown Fair in Hampshire, England, later this summer.
Reuse and recycle
Similar services that will pitch the tent for you and provide other camping equipment are being offered at a number of festivals this year. Other schemes have tried to turn the piles of broken, slashed and soiled tents left behind into other goods, such as rucksacks or clothing.

The Roskilde Festival in Denmark, which attracts 130,000 visitors over eight days, has tried a different approach, creating distinct campsite communities where those staying shoulder the responsibility for keeping their area clean and sustainable.

Some groups are also pushing for donation points at festival site exits, which will allow campers to give their unwanted tents to charities that can put them to good use.

For instance, at the Green Man Festival in the Brecon Beacons this year, audiences will be encouraged to donate any uneaten food and unwanted camping equipment to Help Refugees so it can be sent to help migrants in Calais, France.

"At the end of every event there are thousands of perfectly good tents that have just been abandoned and are just going in the skip," says Matthew Wedge Roberts from Fwrd Together, a charity that salvages tents from festivals so they can be used to help refugees. For the past three years they have been working with local and national charities such as Help Refugees to collect tents, sleeping bags, sleeping mats and wellington boots from festival sites so they can be reused. At this month's Download festival in Leeds, Wedge Roberts says they managed to fill their vans with 250 pairs of wellies, 60 camping chairs and 50 airbeds in a couple of hours.

Back in Bethel, Maria O'Donovan and her team recovered just a small collection of items - including pull tabs, plastic fragments and aluminium foil - from the small patch of ground they excavated close to where the main stage stood during Woodstock in 1969. Their value as archaeological artefacts may be questionable, but they carry an important message, she says.

"The things people throw out have great value for us since they provide insight into what people did, how they acted, what they thought about," says O'Donovan. "Concert facilities, including trash cans, proved completely inadequate when nearly half-a-million people showed up. In the main stage area, they brought in bulldozers and just loaded the trash into trucks for removal."

Modern festivals should, and arguably can, do better.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Music, Culture, Capital, Future and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The people fighting the war on waste at music festivals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It looks like any other field - rolling green hummocks bordered by woodland and a handful of rural buildings. Dig down through the turf and scrape at the top soil, however, and another picture emerges. Amid the dirt, you will find aluminium beer can pull tabs, fragments of bottle glass and plastic.

# data[].attributes.headline
What do you think of this website on 'what festivals are doing to tackle plastic waste'?

# data[].attributes.subject
What do you think of this website on 'what festivals are doing to tackle plastic waste'?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This is how music festivals are tackling plastic waste

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Glastonbury to Coachella, some of the world’s biggest music festivals are trying to reduce their environmental impact by tackling plastic waste.

# data[].attributes.headline
Free entry to a festival is a great incentive to offer volunteers. Perhaps offer them free weekend passes in exchange for their litter picking efforts? Enforcing a rota will ensure any volunteers get their fair share of time away from festival waste management, where they can enjoy the acts and socialise.

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Free entry to a festival is a great incentive to offer volunteers. Perhaps offer them free weekend passes in exchange for their litter picking efforts? Enforcing a rota will ensure any volunteers get their fair share of time away from festival waste management, where they can enjoy the acts and socialise.

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Festivals are a summer staple for making memories full of music, friends and fun. But festival fun comes at a costly price for the planet. Bigger festivals like Glastonbury generate nearly 2000 tonnes of waste in a week, which is around 15kg of waste per festival-goer. And that's on top of the carbon emissions produced across the weekend through diesel fueled stages and lights, and travel to and from the site.

The saying still rings true - every little helps and small changes you make for the earth will make the biggest differences. From choosing sustainable and ethical fashion to hygiene, here are 11 simple ways you can curb your carbon footprint and have more sustainable festival fun!

1 - Car share

Transport is arguably the part of a festival which has the biggest impact on the environment. So much so that festivals have now set up car sharing initiatives, which will not only help out a stranger in need, but it'll cut down on costs and fuel for you. And who knows? It could be the start of a new friendship too!

2 - Don't throw away the tent!

You've seen it all before; the walk through the site at the end of the weekend to see porch doors flapping and tent poles sticking out. In fact, Love Your Tent's survey found that over 60% of people have admitted to ditching their tent after a festival.

Even with festivals claiming to reuse abandoned tents and donate them to humanitarian charities, in reality, this only happens to a small number - the ones still in a salvageable condition. The rest go to landfill, which festival organisers have to pay to throw away.

At the end of the weekend, pack up your tent, use it again for next year, and revel in a little joy knowing you're saving both money and the planet!

3 - Reusable cutlery

Three meals a day for the next four days that you're not eating at home; multiply the one-use cutlery that you'll use by the number of attendees. That is A LOT of plastic cutlery being thrown away. Why not carry a reusable set around? Once you've used them, just clean them up using some biodegradable wet wipes so you can use all over again.

4 - Hygiene

Speaking of wet wipes, with limited access to shower facilities at festivals, wet wipes are the next best thing to keeping yourself clean. Most wipes cause huge environmental problems for water pipes and landfill - even biodegradable wipes! However, the world's first truly flushable wipe does exist, and is plastic free and made from 100% paper tissue.

5 - Toiletry alternatives

Believe it or not, there are so many alternatives to your typical festival toiletries that will help out the environment; natural sunscreen, deodorant sticks or bamboo toilet roll. Plus, the non-liquid alternatives weigh less - maybe this will finally be the year you fulfil the promise to yourself to pack light?

If it so happens that you're unfortunate enough to start riding the crimson wave, having plastic free period products on-hand helps you out and the environment too.

6 - Stay hydrated

Dancing, drinking and sunshine (well, hopefully!), it's extra important to stay hydrated during your weekend. Rather than adding more plastic to the waste, there are tonnes of reusable water bottles that you can take with you to use instead; steel, BPA free plastic, even foldable ones if you want something a little less bulky. Besides, who wants to spend £2.50 on 500ml anyway?

7 - Waterproofs

Sure, with a summer like the one we're having, rain seems like a distant memory. But we do still live in the UK where the weather is totally unpredictable. Don't be tempted by the disposable £3 ponchos and bring your own waterproof. It'll come in handy for many more festivals to come (and however long you'll live in this country for!)

8 - Biodegradable glitter

All that glitters is not gold when you discover that the glitter you've been gluing to your face all this time is microplastic, non-biodegradable and seen as a food item for many animals. Luckily for us, biodegradable glitter is becoming more and more popular, which means you can still get that glitz and glam look this festival season.

9 - Forget about fast-fashion

That festival fringe and those summer sequins are hard to resist clicking on when browsing your favourite fashion sites. But realistically, how often are you going to wear it post-weekend, if you even wear it again? Flex those creative muscles and reinvent the clothes that you already own or swing by the charity shops, there's bound to be some hidden gems in there that'll save you money.

10 - Homemade snacks

Walking from stage to stage and dancing to your favourite songs is bound to use up all your energy. This is where a little snack break is essential to help keep you on your feet. Instead of finding the nearest food stall to eat, bring your own homemade snacks. Raw vegan snacks are a great way to satisfy that small bit of hunger before dinner time, they transport well and will mean less waste too. We love this cacao recipe from Simple Vegan!

11 - Clean up after yourself

And lastly, cleaning up after yourself is the right thing to do. Like we said, the smallest things make the biggest differences! Separate your recycling from your rubbish, take home any spare items like food and toilet roll, and anything that's still salvageable, donate to the collection points dotted around the site.

What steps will you take to have an eco-friendlier festival experience? Let us know on Twitter or tag us on Instagram!

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11 Tips for an Eco-friendly Festival Experience - Natracare

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Festivals are a summer staple for making memories full of music, friends and fun. But festival fun comes at a costly price for the planet. Bigger festivals like Glastonbury generate nearly 2000 tonnes of waste in a week, which is around 15kg of waste per festival-goer.

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How can we protect the environment at festivals?reducing waste to landfill through recycling, composting and eliminating the use of products not suitable for such. using renewable fuels. encouraging and facilitating the use on site of only locally sourced organic food (thus reducing the carbon footprint of food provision.

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How can we protect the environment at festivals?reducing waste to landfill through recycling, composting and eliminating the use of products not suitable for such. using renewable fuels. encouraging and facilitating the use on site of only locally sourced organic food (thus reducing the carbon footprint of food provision.

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How to reduce waste at a festival?Outline waste materials for recycling and disposal. Before your festival begins, it's imperative that you and your organisation have clear guidelines on which types of waste will be expected, and whether they can be recycled: ...Gather a team of waste pickers. ...Encourage guests to correctly dispose of festival waste.

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How to reduce waste at a festival?Outline waste materials for recycling and disposal. Before your festival begins, it's imperative that you and your organisation have clear guidelines on which types of waste will be expected, and whether they can be recycled: ...Gather a team of waste pickers. ...Encourage guests to correctly dispose of festival waste.

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Other than music, drinks, wellies and tents, waste is a common theme for festivals. Every year millions of eager festival-goers grab their tickets and pack their essentials, including toiletries, food and drink, sometimes packaged in cardboard and plastic that generates waste.

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Other than music, drinks, wellies and tents, waste is a common theme for festivals. Every year millions of eager festival-goers grab their tickets and pack their essentials, including toiletries, food and drink, sometimes packaged in cardboard and plastic that generates waste.

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But how many people make the effort to discard their waste properly? According to The Waste Place, "there is an estimated 10,000 tons plus a year of waste generated from festivals, tents, cups, food containers and other associated items" ( The Waste Place, February 2018). At Biffa, we understand the excitement and planning involved with hosting and attending festivals, but we also understand the impact that festival waste can have on the environment.

That's why we've come up with some top tips for effective festival waste management, so the next time your organisation hosts an outdoor event, you can rest assured that your efforts are helping minimise the amount of harmful waste affecting the environment.

1. Outline waste materials for recycling and disposal

Before your festival begins, it's imperative that you and your organisation have clear guidelines on which types of waste will be expected, and whether they can be recycled:

Are all these materials recyclable? Aluminium drink cans and foil wrap certainly are, but what about plastics such as straws, cling film and plastic bags?

You can encourage your festival-goers to ditch the plastic coffee cups by simply not providing them! Why not make it clear at the ticketing stage that you expect ticketholders to bring a reusable cup for their caffeine requirements? Recyclable cardboard straws are an easy alternative to plastic, as are re-usable tote bags in place of plastic carrier bags.

Once you've outlined the main waste materials that can be recycled, you can set up recycling stations throughout your festival venue. Our services extend to the Hospitality and Events sector, covering pubs, hotels, festivals and other outdoor events, with offerings like commodity collection and general waste.

2. Gather a team of waste pickers

As part of your business, you may already have a team ready for days of festival waste management. Teams of trained professionals are important for helping combat excessive festival waste, as they can help instruct volunteer litter pickers and are well-versed in which types of waste should go where.

Free entry to a festival is a great incentive to offer volunteers. Perhaps offer them free weekend passes in exchange for their litter picking efforts? Enforcing a rota will ensure any volunteers get their fair share of time away from festival waste management, where they can enjoy the acts and socialise.

3. Encourage guests to correctly dispose of festival waste

By setting up brightly-coloured, easy to spot waste stations throughout your venue, chances are some people will take notice. Label each bin to segregate waste effectively and give examples of the types of waste each bin should contain. This should help your business work towards effective festival waste management.

Of course, not everyone will be accustomed to the different waste streams, but it goes a long way in educating people about the correct disposal measures whilst having fun.

Strive for a zero waste event

Want to make your festival a zero waste event? Achieving zero waste at your event involves re-using and recycling absolutely every piece of waste produced. It can be a large part of a business' corporate social responsibility, and can also create cost savings when done well.

There are many different steps involved with planning to go zero waste, such as procurement and target setting. Just a simple understanding of the waste produced is a step in the right direction.

All this can come under a quality event waste management plan. Having one of these in place ahead of your festival will ensure your team are all on the same page, and that your business can work towards improving its environmental credibility achieving effective festival waste management.

Having years of experience managing large festivals such as the Reading & Leeds festival and Truckfest, Biffa works alongside you at a strategic level to reduce waste at source, increase recycling and optimise your services to deliver environmental targets while supporting your event and if you're lucky we may even send out a Wasteater...

If you'd like to find out more about how Biffa could support your business' next event, get in touch today.

About the author

Hamza Fazal

Hamza is part of Biffa's digital team, writing a diverse range of content on a number on industry topics. Hamza's favourite topic is Hazardous Waste, so look out for his handy tips coming your way!

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Top Tips For Effective Festival Waste Management

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But how many people make the effort to discard their waste properly? According to The Waste Place, "there is an estimated 10,000 tons plus a year of waste generated from festivals, tents, cups, food containers and other associated items" ( The Waste Place, February 2018).