To say take your festival tent home and reuse it

DH goes to Metal festivals in Europe (France, Germany etc). There's a cup deposit, so they think nothing about picking up any discarded ones to get extra money off at the bars...

He's mentioned full bin bags being exchanged for festival credit (food, drink, merch) as well.

Ah right. To be fair the festival I usually go to (Greenbelt) everyone clears up their own rubbish so you'd be hard pushed to find the extra to have enough. I guess it's not the sort of festival that needs rules like that though!

I think the idea is that you clear up rubbish from the site as a whole. And they have separate sacks for recycling.

I’ve abandoned a tent once (not at Glasto). It was my first pop-up one and I think they were a new thing. I couldn’t collapse the fecking thing despite watching YouTube vids, copious reading of instructions and the combined efforts of a selection of randoms. I even tried to wrestle it whole into the boot of my SUV, but failed miserably at that too.

I retrieved the tent pegs because you can never have enough of those! 😁

I did wonder how many of those “abandoned” at Glasto were pop-ups because I have never found a satisfactory technique for collapsing them.

The mess left after Glastonbury is disgusting. I’d have it banned.
Scummy tramps.

It’s understandable that some of the tents are too cheap and too damaged to be reused. Festival organizers could provide sufficient trash receptacles. That way people would at least face the reality of exactly where the tent was going and there would be less work for crews.

My DS goes to a festival where part of your ticket price is a deposit which you only get back when you present a certain number of rubbish sacks at the exit.

What if you haven't generated enough rubbish? Last time I was at a festival I had less than 1 black sack. I would have had to have binned all my recyclables, rather than disposing of them in the correct bins all weekend.

Yes, we get them on Dartmoor too. During lockdown some of these idiots camped on an SSSI there too. But we get kids out there too with cheap tents, seen them leave soiled toilet paper behind, in places where people regularly walk too.

I don't understand why genuine wild campers go on defending them, which they seem to do.

The whole thing is fucking disgusting, over-entitled wankers leaving their plastic shite everywhere.

This wasn't normal when I was attending festivals in the 90s but suppose you didn't pay hundreds of pounds for a ticket.

I've been volunteering at Reading Festival salvage for the past 6 years with a refugee charity. We collect 100's if not 1000's of tents and sleeping bags that are usually taken to France for reuse in the camps. Obviously we only collect ones in good nick but they don't have to be pristine, just clean & dry. And all the volunteers are taught how to pack a tent.

We also collect leftover food for local foodbanks.

But as mentioned we only get a limited amount of time to salvage after the event, usually just over a day so there's not time to salvage all that's useful.

I was shocked the first time I saw this. When I went to festivals, I wouldn't have imagined anyone leaving a tent behind!

Devise a system at least for the larger festivals, make it a condition that is met for them to be able to take place, and those who leave a tent behind face a meaningful sanction.

Or maybe add a hefty deposit on to ticket prices and find a way of refunding back to those that can be bothered to return.

Those that can't be arsed lose their deposit which could then be given to local community projects/charity.

Devise a system at least for the larger festivals, make it a condition that is met for them to be able to take place, and those who leave a tent behind face a meaningful sanction.

Given the profile of those who go to the main festivals, something like not being able to go again if enforceable, or attend a number of other large scale events, or perhaps deny them their winter skiing holiday.

To be fair I don’t think it’s that people don’t know where it goes, or think it goes to charity, they know it goes in the bin they just can’t be arsed to do it themselves.

We went to a large festival 3 years ago now and even there it was well advertised that the only tents that would be taken & reused are the ones that have been packed away and left ready to go- nobody was going to be dismantling any that had been left. And posters around the festival & on their social media to take them home or they’d be binned. People just aren’t bothered. It’s baffling to me because if nothing else it’s a real waste of money! We saw some really big 8 man tents that were brilliant, probably cost a few hundred pound easily just been left.

And yes, people are probably not wanting to pack a wee'd or puked on cheap tent on a train or coach.

So somebody else has to deal with the wee'd on, puked on tent. Can't they at least put it in a skip, or whatever the arrangement is for rubbish disposal?

And those same people then protest about 'right to roam', etc.

I don't agree with people just leaving a tent 'as is' at a festival....can imagine some are in a gross state and I don't see why the owners feel it's up to someone else to dismantle their weekends grossness.

At the very least there should be skips where they can be placed into and collected.

Worse are the brainless TikTok inspired ‘wild campers’ who go up on to the Lake District fells and similar and leave tents and other debris on grazing land, Sites of Scientific Interest etc.

And have fires and BBQ’s there too.

And then have the Mountain Rescue volunteers come and get them because they are lost / cold etc.

My DS goes to a festival where part of your ticket price is a deposit which you only get back when you present a certain number of rubbish sacks at the exit.

Some festival tents really aren’t up to more than one use at a festival. The whole business is a sustainability issue.

Tents are cheap compared to tickets these days. And yes, people are probably not wanting to pack a wee'd or puked on cheap tent on a train or coach.

FWIW, I litter pick so would never ever do this. I can sort of see why some drunk tired people do though.

We drove out of the Glastonbury camper van field in 2013 past a chemical toilet that someone couldn't be bothered to empty and just left.
I was genuinely horrified by how lazy people were at Glastonbury (and it was the younger ones) - bins everywhere and yet people would just get up and walk off, leaving their lunch containers and cutlery on the floor.

Back when I last went, over 20 years ago, tents weren't left so much. The reason? Tents weren't that cheap. Many people borrowed one. We bought ours for our first Glastonbury in 1994 and it served us well, doing 5 Glastonburies and several additional camping trips.

Basically there has been a big increase since then in availability of flimsy 'disposable' tents off sites like Temu and Amazon. Way back when, you had to go to a proper shop and spend a bit so you made it last.

I'm not sure the average Mumsnet user would leave a tent at a festival.
They might have a word with the young people around them about it. I don't think my offspring would leave a tent. They were all bought one each once old enough to camp alone and they look after it.