To say take your festival tent home and reuse it

[Theolittle]

If you don’t It ends up in landfill. There is a myth out there that it goes to charity, it’s not true. To go to charity it would need to be spotlessly clean and the charity workers would need to be able to pack the tents properly. The people that leave the tents don’t leave them in good condition and are just lazy ignorant horrible wasteful people. It’s disgusting - the people that do this are disgusting. Glastonbury and other festivals should be telling people it goes to landfill and to stop doing it

YANBU, but people aren't going to just change, without some sort of system in place to enforce the change.

Decathlon this year are offering refunds for used festival tents.

Some get recycled as in, some people take some tents and make stuff out of them. Some are taken to landfill, that’s true and some are burned. It’s a sad state of affairs really though the amount of pure shit left behind at these festivals.

So how will you police this?

Make them hire tents from the organisers?
Surely the organisers could use some of their profits and deal with the issue?

AI says: In the financial year ending March 2024, Glastonbury Festival reported a pre-tax profit of £5.9 million, which was a significant increase from the previous year. The festival also donated £5.2 million to charity during that period

YANBU of course but twats will twat. What is so disturbing is these are usually the people who are all about extinction rebellion. (I say that as a festival goer of decades experience)

I am always surprised at the number of tents left behind at Glastonbury. Especially as a large percentage of the festival attendees are Gen Z,who I thought were meant to be really clued up about waste,stuff going to landfill, recycling etc. What's the betting that some of them are members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil?

i go to festivals and I can assure you that 95% of people take their tents home, I was fairly late leaving and the vast majority had packed up and left before 10am, including tents. Perhaps is just the Glastonbury crowd?

I went to V festival about 12 years ago and left mine there- it had been weed all over (not by me). It was disgusting. It couldn’t come in the car and stink it out and I wouldn’t have used it again

I saw a tik tok video of the tents left over this year and one of them was a massive berghaus family tent that people were saying was between £700 and over a grand to buy new !!! I expect they had borrowed that from a family member who was expecting it home and wouldn’t be too happy .
My Dad has never got over my sister borrowing a tent off him years ago and her ex boyfriend taking it with him when he left and my Dads camping days are well and truly over 😂😂
Theres no care about money with some people . The effort getting it home isn’t worth it to them .

My DDs Scout group gets some tents from a festival.

But... the charities basically get a few hours to scavenge what they can. Its barely a dent.

I saw the Berghaus tent video, we have a similar one... especially with all the other equipment!!!

(Although I've been wrestling with a bloody pop up tent this afternoon, gearing up for round 3 of trying to get it it back in the bag.)

(We've also left a tent behind on a camping trip... a broken one, but still collapsed it and put it in the bin!)

Also... the charities don't want cheap single skin "festival" tents. They need actual decent kit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The people that do it seem to think it’s the done thing to do and that it’s socially acceptable. I think the organisers need to advertise that it’s not acceptable, and that the vast majority tents cannot be reused. Blokes use the side of tents as urinals so they can’t be used.

it’s another symptom of a throwaway society with cheap fashion another prime example. And it does tend to be young students who are the worst ( with rich parents or racking up loans that they’ll never pay for)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.