One week it’s a farmer’s field, and the next it’s a teeming mass of people, tents, stages, toilets, kitchens and bars. British music festivals are some of the biggest parties on the planet, so naturally they can leave a bit of a mess behind.
Julie’s Bicycle is a not-for-profit music industry watchdog that provides research and information for sustainable business practices, and manages the Industry Green certification programme. “In lots of ways, festivals have led the entire music industry in waste management,” Helen Heathfield, director of energy and environment for the group, tells Access. “They are way ahead of fixed venues in so many ways because the rubbish left behind is so visible.”
The average punter, Heathfield says, will produce about two kilos of rubbish every day, so festival organisers need to think carefully about how to manage all of that before it starts piling up. Fortunately, festival crowds tend to be just the right demographic to work with.
“They tend to be quite environmentally minded,” Suzanne Clark, business manager at Aktrion Recycling & Waste Management, says. “And obviously giving out a green message is something that sponsors can boast about.”
More festivals and events are paying attention to their eco credentials, and as trendy as all things green are, the BS 8901 ‘specification for a sustainability management system for events’ can now provide some assurance that any ‘environmentally friendly’ festival isn’t guilty of greenwashing. The 47 recipients of this year’s Greener Festival Award include a good number from the UK, the best of which will be named at the UK Festival Awards on November 18.
And industry groups like the Sustainable Event Alliance and A Greener Festival are working to help organisers everywhere understand how to minimise the mess.
Plan Ahead
The most important step to getting rid of all the rubbish as quickly as possible is to come up with a careful plan. So more waste management providers are popping up to help.
“I have worked providing crew and technicians for 12 years, and was always disgusted at the amount of good material that went straight into the skip,” John Diamond, operations director at Edinburgh-based Diamond Event Services, says. The company duly added recycling and waste management services to its portfolio earlier this year.
“The easiest thing to do is to chuck everything and send it to landfill, but it’s definitely not the cheapest. Anything you recycle will actually save you money because facilities will accept recyclable material for nothing.”
Tax on waste sent to landfill in the UK is currently £48 per tonne, and will increase by £8 per year until at least 2014/2015, when it will have reached £80 per tonne. The goal is to prevent any paper or plastic from reaching a tipping site by 2013, and nothing at all by 2020.
“The average event is now achieving a 15 to 30 per cent recycling rate. Add composting and you could get up to 40 per cent,” Ed Cook, business manager at Network Recycling, says.
Festivals routinely leave out brightly labeled bins so people can chuck their paper plates, plastic cups and metal cans into the right batch. Wooden cutlery, napkins made from recycled paper, and plastic beer cups made from PET as opposed to polypropylene, are all helping. And the greenest festivals are now setting out bins to capture food waste for composting or biogas generation.
One of the most progressive changes is the cup deposit system. Instead of a thin disposable, bars at festivals like Latitude are giving out durable plastic pint pots, like those produced by the Incredible Cup Company, for a £2 deposit.
“I can’t believe how sceptical I was five years ago when these first came out,” Cook says. “They are brilliant, and they have had a massive impact.”
Elsewhere, many festivals are implementing a deposit scheme of 5 to 10 pence per cup on the regular paper and plastic kinds, so the young and the skint go around collecting them to earn spare change.
“Even if an event organiser doesn’t have the funds to invest in a reusable cup initiative, a deposit system can help them improve recycling rates and spare their conscience without spending a penny.”
Human Error
Even with the best and most carefully laid plans, a lot of any festival’s impact is in the hands of the audience. The most clearly labeled and thickly dotted recycling bins won’t make a difference if people don’t bother to separate their waste properly. Carelessness remains a problem.
“The big challenge is to get people to use the facilities properly,” Matthew Ball, special events manager for Grundon Waste Management, explains.
Which is why it sets up only one bin for all recyclable materials, in order to make it as simple as possible for the public. “We can then separate all the paper, plastic and glass ourselves afterwards.”
Even then, there will always be a huge number of cups, forks, napkins, leaflets and plates left on the ground. A small army of litter pickers can quickly gather up most of it, but the smaller bits require weeks of work.
Take cigarette butts, an estimated 20 million of which are left behind on the fields of Glastonbury, and tent pegs. Both have to be painstakingly picked out of the grass to prevent illness and injury when Michael Eavis’s dairy cows return. And there is a new, growing problem. Festivalgoers, often sleep deprived, lazily leaving big things behind in campsites, from sleeping bags to folding chairs and whole tents.
“As long as Asda sells tents for £10 this is going to be a problem,” Heathfield says. “It comes with the assumption of disposability that runs through our whole culture.”
It’s Only Natural
There is of course the matter of the waste that no amount of planning, scolding or coaching can prevent.
“You can never have enough toilets,” Clive Owen of A1 Loo Hire says simply, and the company has provided for Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals among others. Numbers are subject to realistic budget constraints, but on the plus side, the number of attendants A1 provides to clean the toilets has increased dramatically. “Sometimes we are able to get round three times a day and people really appreciate that,” he says.
Nonetheless, punters are still making careless additions to their loo deposits. “We are constantly having our pipes blocked up by beer cans and cups that people throw down the loos,” Owen says. And when it comes to long drops, the mess becomes even more of a nightmare. “People throw all manner of things down there. We’ve pulled all sorts of things out, wellies, bin liners, even entire tents.”
Heathfield is a big fan of compost toilets. Not only do they negate the use of chemicals, they also cut down on water use, and return waste to the soil rather than using up energy and water at sewage plants. Alongside which, the open air environment can be a lot more pleasant than an enclosed space.
“Punters really like them, and I think we can expect to see them more and more in the future,” she says.
Australian compost loo provider Natural Event, supplier to Secret Garden Party, Sunrise Celebration, Waveform and other festivals around the UK, even attempts to give patrons an experience that makes them feel ‘happy and respected’ by covering the doors of every stall in floral art and cheeky graffiti.
In The Pipeline
There are other innovations that Heathfield expects to go mainstream, most to do with food waste, which will remain a big source of rubbish no matter how high the percentage of cups and plates that gets recycled.
“I’m really looking forward to composting becoming truly standard,” she says. “Having anaerobic digesters right on site linked to all the catering stalls so all the food waste can go directly to producing energy.”
In a perfect world everyone would bring their own cups, plates, pint glasses and cutlery. Mural-splattered compost toilets would be ubiquitous. All sets would be made from reclaimed and recycled materials, and reused the next year. No toxic metals in the wiring or hazardous chemicals in the fabric. And that’s just material waste. There’s still the emissions and air pollution from transport and energy to consider. A green festival utopia would be powered entirely by micro wind turbines and solar panels. Everyone would reach the site by train or electric car. All food would be sourced locally from sustainably managed farms. There’s a lot that can be done.
“But the bottom line is that festivals are pretty good,” Heathfield concludes.
“They have taken huge amounts of action over the years, and started incorporating these initiatives long before local authorities in many cases. By providing alternative behavioural spaces where people can try out new things, they have done a lot to raise people’s awareness of all the issues and have played a vital role in waste management leadership. They receive a lot of criticism because the waste left behind is so visible.”
What we throw out at home, after all, is channeled away. Out of sight, and out of mind. Anyone who tuts at the mess left behind by a weekend of music would be wise to keep things in perspective. “If you could see what the average street produces in a weekend it would be one interesting comparison,” she nods.