Disgusted with the rubbish left behind at Reading Festival

[mydogisthebest]

Every festival is the same, tons of rubbish left behind.

All those tents just left and most of them will be going to landfill they said this morning.

Considering the average festival goer is fairly young why do they not care about all the rubbish? The lazy so and so's can't even be bothered to take the tents down let alone carry them to the collection point.

Apparently there was also loads of food just left!

These are the youngsters that supposedly care about the planet and climate change. Yeah like hell they do. Some might but the majority just don't.

The mentality of buying a tent and food and other items and then just up and leaving them just beggars belief. The parents have obviously not taught values.

I used to live very close to where the V Festival was held and the amount of rubbish left behind used to amaze me every year.

Apparently it will take a team (no idea how many) 2 weeks to clear Reading.

It makes me so angry

[quote crumpet]@BeenAsFarAsMercyAndGrand once the tent is covered in vomit/ cigarette burn holes etc it’s not reusable - although there is still no excuse for not disposing of it properly.[/quote]
If it's in that state, they can hardly claim that it'll be used to house homeless people can they? And yet lots of people are saying that's what they claim.

It's really simple: Buy a decent little tent with the intention of reusing it. If it inadvertently gets trashed, then dispose of it responsibly. If it doesn't (which is more likely), take it home and reuse it next time.

"I'm too hungover", '"I don't have a car", "it was damaged", "it'll be used for the homeless" or "everyone else does it" are not excuses for leaving a tent behind.

Regular name changer. OP, my DD planned to collect bags of litter and take part in the clean up. She’s 17 and went to Reading for the first time this year. We had planned to collect her on Monday morning but she rang us at 4am very distressed because people were setting fire to tents, exploding aerosol cans and throwing open bottles of urine around the camp site. We immediately left to pick her up and I’m afraid she didn’t take her tent or rubbish with her. She felt very vulnerable and for specific reasons that I won’t go into was on the brink of being left alone in this environment.

She camped for 5 nights and the official music blared out constantly except for 4 hours between 4am to 8am. She doesn’t do drugs and drank only moderately but the chaotic and frankly dangerous festival environment is not conducive to young people being able to look after themselves properly let alone caring for the environment after often several days of living like this. Many of the young people we saw were wandering around like the living dead. It was pretty horrific.

I think there are some utter shits attending festivals who simply do not care about anything but I also feel that it’s incredibly hard for a long stay at a festival to end up being anything other than an exercise in self preservation.

On a purely practical level lugging a huge black sack of rubbish along with tent, chair, back pack etc on a long train when you’re barely functioning after days without sleep just isn’t going to happen. It’s a reflection in many cases, IMO of the chaotic and ill conceived festival experience rather than an indictment of the majority of individual festival goers.

It's the same every year. Part of the blame lies with the retailers and manufacturers. Some of these tents are such poor quality they just aren't designed to be repeatedly pitched and packed away. Like fast fashion these things end up in landfill.

If you've barely spent any money on a tent and the site needs to be vacated by a certain time there's no incentive to make the effort. If your tent cost as much as your ticket you might think again.

As a nation we need to stop selling cheap crap.

Don't understand this - same as people who go on barbecues and picnics and don't take their rubbish home - they bought the stuff in with them - surely it's no more difficult to carry it back? Possibly easier because you've eaten the food, drunk the beer etc.

Yep, I was going to say this too. It is absolutely no harder to take your rubbish home with you than it was to take it there in the first place.

250,000 tents each year are left at festivals. There are 'rent a tent' schemes at some festivals in which you buy the tent from a provider for a decent sum, but get a portion of that back if you sell it back to the provider in reasonable condition. They clean it and resell at the next festival. Has to be better than the buy and dump approach?

I agree it’s about seeing what everyone else does around you. I camped at Glasto in a camper van and our field was 95% clear of rubbish. It motivates you to take a bag that bit further to a bin with space, or take it home. I live in Reading and it’s been like this for as long as I can remember (first festival was in 1994), although the tent situation has got worse since the cheaper pop up ones became available. Some of our local residents groups volunteer for the clean up - they are awesome as it’s a tough job.

@SusieBob Yep, she said they had cans of petrol that they were dousing them with and then chucking over other people's tents. Absolutely disgusting, would love to know what their parents think of them.

@Dreamstate

Why don't you point the finger at the parents of those children who early haven't raised them up to respect the environment enough to not litter, plenty of mumsnetters whose children attended....

If they're old enough to go to a festival alone, they're old to take responsibility for their own actions.

Extinction rebellion should hold a protest telling the festival goers to clean it up

Isn't it ER who've come up with the ruse that individuals shouldn't be blamed for whatever? Quite convenient really, giving a pass not only to their own behaviour but to this kind of thing as well

As ever, too many like to catastrophise, virtue signal and bray about "what everybody MUST do", but it stops well short of any personal responsibility

Also the setting fire to everything on a Sunday is absolutely awful. The festival need to clamp down on that before a tragedy happens. It’s been pretty close before.

Sunday night is lawless, and that’s one of the reasons there is gridlock after last act. So many people don’t want to be there on Sunday night.

Maybe the government should consider banning the ultra-cheap tents, in the same way as the 'single-use' carrier bags. We (like many people) always used the bags multiple times and then used them as bin bags once they were getting worn, but clearly enough people just binned them the instant they got home - or didn't even bother to find an actual bin - hence they were banned for everybody. £20-£30 is nowhere near enough to make a half-decent environmentally-friendly tent that can be used many times.

Obviously not everybody is abandoning their tents as litter, but the culture is that enough people seem to see them as single-use items - and aren't intelligent enough/sufficiently well brought-up to understand how to use a bin, even for items that are single-use. I'd love to know if they have thousands of empty crisp bags, chocolate wrappers and drinks bottles all around their living rooms at home, because they seem not to know what a bin is.

[quote ElvisPresleyHadABaby]@SusieBob Yep, she said they had cans of petrol that they were dousing them with and then chucking over other people's tents. Absolutely disgusting, would love to know what their parents think of them.[/quote]
DS said it was terrible Sunday night, he was camped near the hedges between camps and he saw alsorts being launched over

@NotDavidTennant lots of the people who clean up are local volunteers, who care about our community, although the organisers were cleaning up the roadside yesterday.

@RandomUser72 I agree with you. My DD (also 17) was at Leeds. She was beyond exhausted when I picked her up from the station at 7am.

"Nicer" festivals will have a "nicer" (middle aged, mostly white, professional, family) crowd who are better at looking after themselves and others and doing their bit.

Festivals like Leeds and Reading look like gigantic school trips and as such will attract bad behaviour and attitudes. The good thing is that these sites will be cleared, by specialist teams. The clean up is budgeted for.

The message of not creating a shit-tip whilst you are there is something that seems to be lost on those camping, but until festival organisers really focus on this and drive some change, it will continue.

It's disgusting. I go to a lot of bike rallies....one of our biggest each year is a 3 day for a couple of thousand bikers. If you look at the fields on the last day, you'd never know anyone was there. Everyone clears up their own patch....cans / rubbish goes into black bags which are collected by the club. If a tent is broken, it's thrown in with the rubbish, not just left. I don't know why it's so difficult for a bunch of teenagers to clean up after themselves.

They genuinely believe that litter and waste is a problem, yet they genuinely believe they are not to blame for it when they leave stuff behind.

Or, and this might be hard to grasp, the people leaving stuff behind are not the same people who care about the environment. It it entirely possible that an entire festival full of people have different beliefs.

Ask many a teen if they're prepared to wear second hand clothing or use an old mobile (or better yet no mobile at all ...how do I manage!). To eat non commercially processed food, not to buy fast food.....in fact any of the trappings of modern 21st century life and I can image what the answer would be. The idealist view of curbing consumerism to save the planet is flawed on so many levels

@LindaEllen

I think the reason they don't see it as 'littering' is because they know the site will be cleared when they've left. It's akin to people who leave their rubbish in the cinema.

Our cinema has put signs up asking for rubbish to be left at seats. Not sure why as I thought this would make cleaning harder!

I agree. Every generation frets about climate change and with good reason, but every generation also repeats the cycle of making it worse.

I think the only way we're going to see some change is if the government makes some touch laws about it and enforces them.

For example, the festival organizer could have been slapped with a big fine for leaving all this rubbish behind. I am not sure how you would hold individual festival goers responsible, though. Maybe they could post signs like hotel rooms do that state "75% of our attendees reuse, resell or recycle their tents." It creates a kind of peer pressure situation to do the same.

The setting fire thing is terrifying. This is indeed going to end up in tragedy. Surely a stipulation of being able to hold such events is fire marshals? These people should be booted off site.

I stared going to festivals in the 90s (still do a couple a year), I can't remember leaving your tent behind being a thing then. Maybe due to cheap, bad quality tents not being so readily available?

At Boardmasters the ticket price includes a £10 litter bond. You get the money bag if you hand in a full bin liner of rubbish.

Also, the compost-able plastic glasses they served drinks in had to have a deposit paid, and reused or exchanged. So meant less likely to leave them lying around on the floor.

Having picked Dd and friends up, from their actual tent position on the field, from both Boardmasters and Leeds I can honestly say that on both occasions they left no trace behind. Dd and her friends are pretty responsible though and wouldn't dream of just leaving stuff.

Tent has come back with us both times, to be used again, along with all other equipment.

Bags of litter were placed in the litter areas.

Excess food that hadn't been opened was added to the 'food bank donation' tables. Alcohol came home with us - wasn't allowed to be donated.

Almost all have recycle and donation areas - this includes places to leave tents and sleeping bags, etc that are still in good condition; but they have to be taken down.

We actually didn't see much rubbish etc left behind but Dd wasn't on the main campsites, which I'm sure are much worse.

The litter bonds make sense.

Not all festivals are like that. Reading and V Festival are chavvy.

Our cinema has put signs up asking for rubbish to be left at seats. Not sure why as I thought this would make cleaning harder!

My bag got ruined once when a food tray containing barbecue sauce got left under my seat and I put my bag in it not knowing it was there. It wasn’t an expensive bag but even so….

TBH if people are that fussed then they should campaign for these festivals to be banned. When you take into account the CO2 emissions of everyone travelling to the site, the bands flying in from all over the world and those generated by the site itself over 5 days, then the impact of some litter and tents is almost certainly a drop in the ocean.

The son of a friend got free tickets to Glastonbury as he was part of the team of clearer uppers afterwards.
Apparently many people buy 2 tents. One to use as a toilet, the other to sleep in.

@loopylindi

Ask many a teen if they're prepared to wear second hand clothing or use an old mobile (or better yet no mobile at all ...how do I manage!). To eat non commercially processed food, not to buy fast food.....in fact any of the trappings of modern 21st century life and I can image what the answer would be. The idealist view of curbing consumerism to save the planet is flawed on so many levels

On the other hand, they are basically following a system that we (the 'oldies' - one of which I am) have set up....

A bit rich to create a society/system that says 'you don't need to take away your tent at festival', where you can buy tents just for that (aka they are cheap and not strudy because they are designed for a one off use) and then tell the people who use said one use only item that they are 'bad' for doing so.....

If you don't want people to leave waste and tents at a festival, start by making it hard for them to do so. Give the message that this is not and will not be accepted. At the moment it is, you just have to walk away!
It has been like this for years. Why has any of the 'oldies' have ever accepted that? Because lets be honest, leaving your waste lying around has never been an OK thing to do!