With any festival or concert, comes rubbish. Whether it's food waste, plastic waste or general waste, there is always a lot. How does this really affect the environment?
Where does all the rubbish go?
More than 60 independent British festivals have pledged to rid sites of single-use plastic by 2021.
These festivals have at least committed to banning the use of plastic straws this year, but they hope this will extend to items such as plastic bottles in the future. The AIF (Association of Independent Festivals) says festival go-ers need to think about "re-using" instead of "single-use." They have set up a 3 year target to eradicate single-use plastic with 61 festivals that have signed up to the AIF's Drastic on Plastic campaign.
Glastonbury Festival
Glastonbury Festival has been held intermittently from 1970 to 1981 but since then it has been held every year, except for fallow years. Fallow years are a really great way to give the land, local population and organisers a break, roughly taken at five year intervals. The five-day festival, called for more than 1,000 cleaning volunteers to resurrect the land. The clean-up costed £785,000 in 2017 and lasted 6 weeks. The 200,000 festival-goers left behind mounds of rubbish.
Reading joined forces with Greenpeace this summer to help "festival-goers stem the tide of plastic pollution" which is one of the greatest threats to our oceans.
All plastic bottles and cups bought at Reading had a 10p refundable deposit. Up to 12.7million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans every year. To reduce plastic pollution, Greenpeace works towards eliminating single-use plastic packaging in UK.
Last year at Reading Festival 2017, you returned a massive 250,000 plastic bottles and cups. This has led to a Deposit return scheme being introduced in the UK on plastic bottles!
Find out more information on these websites.
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