Excess rubbish and abandoned tents are left behind as 135,000 leave Glastonbury Festival....

I have been going to music festivals ever since I was 12 years of age, but I have never seen such waste as this left over after a festival...

There has always been mountains of rubbish left behind when festivals have ended, but for people to leave behind tents, sleeping bags, chairs and even inflatable paddling pools, just goes to show what a wasteful society we really do live in...

Much of the stuff that was left behind was purposely bought and taken to the festival just so that they could not be bothered to roll up the tents etc, and actually take them back home with them. People at one time took great pride with their belongings because they had been paid for by their hard earned wages. Items were taken, used and then returned home with their owners to be used again the next time...

I know that items such as tents are now so cheap that they can be just tossed away, but at least have some pride and at least stick the unwanted items somewhere near a rubbish bin for other to dispose of...

Personally I just think that it is just pure laziness and the way that much of society has become in our times. Nobody really gives a damn anymore about others and the environment around them, they just do their thing, run away and let others pick up the pieces and clean up their mess....

This year's Glastonbury Festival, the world's biggest green-field music festival, is over and the work to turn the farmland that it occupies back into green fields is under way....

So much excess rubbish and abandoned tents are left behind as 135,000 revelers leave Glastonbury Festival. Hundreds of tents were abandoned despite the festival encouraging people to take their tents home with them....

Amongst the beer cans, food packaging, wet wipes, used condoms and other detritus that you would expect from a full-on festival of this type, there are hundreds of perfectly usable tents, many bought only for this festival and left where they were pitched just five days ago...

So, five year's after the launch of its 'Leave no trace' campaign, why is the message not getting through to festival-goers?

www.demotix.com...-2215117

What are the balloons and small co2 cartridges for?

And what a disgusting mess. If I am sleeping in a tent it will be in the middle of nowhere and it will be as clean or cleaner than I found it when I leave.

WTF ever happened to "take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints"?

The only way to combat this is to designate pitches,

as the tickets are all already named and phtographed to prevent fraud, when you purchase tickets you purchase a camping plot, at the end of the fesitval if there is stuff in the camping spot anyone affiliated with that pitch is banned from future years...

if you all want to camp together you either book, or submit a requests which will be fullfiled at the campsites discretion...

that will be the only real way to prevent it, esecially as the spoiled and lazy younger generation would rather be soo wasted and sleep deprived they cant be bothered tidying the mess....


there may be flaming for this, i have been to alot of festvals, some with tents, some with ccaravans, i have been in the fancy camping aand the bog standard low level camping, even stayed ina hotel once on the last night!
as i drive, i rarley get too drunk on the final night, as i enjoy camping i have good equipment i take care of and have pride in, there is no excuse to not just tidy your gear away.

the mentality of "someone else will do it" is to blame, so we need to go back to a scenario where people are held accountable.

reply to post by TFCJay


the balloons and cartridges are laughing gas.

reply to post by davethebear

Thats very sad and a poor reflection on those who attended.

Clean up after yourselves and dont litter FFS.

reply to post by TFCJay


hehe it's laughing gas that picture must be by the stones as i was offered it only a few years ago i passed and laughed at my mate's doing it also back to the point it is a shame as this is a wonderful place mind boggling the size of it now compared to when it started

reply to post by TFCJay


It's laughing gas. It's popular with the kids right now.

The only people who can afford to go to Glastonbury don't really care about leaving tents behind. Just buy another next year. By the time Monday morning comes, the come down kicks in and the environment goes out the window.

But it was funny while being on laughing gas for a time.

Hya

I was there about ten years ago.
The mess is still the same, not to mention fighting for a space with dogs for a crap,
and the amount of stolen cars that are left behind, including cheap bangers that
have been bought just to drive there, the local scrapyard makes a mint every year
as does the farmers who charge 50 quid to tow you out the mud.

reply to post by GonzoSinister


People gonna start throwing stuff at other parcels and it´s not like you have white lines on the ground "Camping Ground X21G11 or so. Even if you leave your place clean, who says anyone won´t dump their stuff there after that.
Impossible

Huh... so thats what a feild full of rich hippies leave behind? Who knew?

Honestly. It ammuses me somewhat. I go to Bloodstock Open Air every year, and the one thing that always impresses me is that despite the fact that Bloodstock is a brutal festival, for brutal people, you do not get anywhere near the level of crap per square foot that seems to have been left by the Glasto lot.

I mean, sure there are one hundred and thirty five thousand people in those fields, compared with Bloodstocks eleven thousand. But that does not mean much ,considering there is an upper limit to the people per square foot, Glasto just has more square feet of room, and therefore more people. There is FAR more crap per square foot on this image, than I have ever seen at Bloodstock, and we get bands there that are basically singing about totally destroying everything, and wearing bits of people as a hat. The most brutal thing you get at Glasto is the ticket price, that might leave you bleeding, but the fest itself is for rich, and basically hippy scene types.

And yet its that crowd that are trashing tents and leaving them there in great numbers. I mean sure, I have seen tents left behind after a festival, who hasnt? I saw one tent get wrecked within four hours of a festival begining, it got used as a toilet for three days, but that was one of maybe a hundred tents in the whole campsite that got left behind. This looks like THOUSANDS of tents, camping chairs, assorted trash and crap, sleeping bags, pillows, stuff that is actually worth money.

See, I think that metal heads are generally not so well off as to be quite this careless. I personally value my kit. I value my pop up tent that I can get pitched in forty seconds. I value my bergen in which I transport my assorted clothes, wash bag bits, loo roll and sundry items. I value my sleeping bag because it is light weight, durable, and warm. I do not WANT to have to spend money on a new camping chair each year. This is why I look after my kit, because it looks after me, and it does a bang up job. And I look after my trash because when it comes time to buy next years ticket for Bloodstock (which is no where near as expensive as a Glasto ticket, and gives access to better music in my opinion) I want to pay as little as possible for a great weekend, and I know, that if we leave the place in crap, the cost goes up the next year.

I am not saying that metal heads leave a trail of perfectly manicured turf and nothing but behind them, after three days of getting thrashed in the moshpit, drinking till dawn, and marching around and kicking some ass, but at the end of the fest, the devastation is much less complete, much less widespread. Pockets of total chaos are par for the course, but those Glasto shots... they are just seas of discarded tents and assorted crap. Theres more cloth than field in those shots, and that is bloody appalling.

Originally posted by TFCJay
What are the balloons and small co2 cartridges for?

Fer huffin' bro

I think i'ma pop down there next festival, grab me some free tents...
Ebay, here I come!


Such a shame though, people have little respect nowadays...

reply to post by davethebear


Glastonbury has changed. In the 1980's you could drive onto site and park up next to wherever you chose to pitch your tent.

That changed for fire safety reasons, apparently. Being able to pack your motor without lugging all your gear over x amount of fields to get to the car parks, especially after a long weekend hard partying, probably helped ensure better site clearance.

Originally posted by GonzoSinister
The only way to combat this is to designate pitches

baaa.

ID love to be a clean up guy there lol, id drive a van round and put all the tents in it, make a fortune selling them! God knows how much money youd find lying around and other random stuff like jewellry.

Go to a mainstream fest like Glastonbury has been for an absolute age, and that is what you get - it's a very middle of the road, commercial affair despite the many alt folk that still go. It's a frikkin city ffs and leaves a trace accordingly.

Go to a nice small festi of a few hundred or a coupla thousand folk and it's a very different story, people respect the place, walk the site for trash and so on. It's a village, simples.

reply to post by davethebear


Is this really such a big problem?! It gives load of jobs to the area for the clean up and the people who do these jobs often find a lot of great, valuble stuff. I live in Reading and know people who clear up Reading festival and find all sorts of stuff, even wallets left behind full of cash have been found.

Has it caused any real problems? The clean up will sort it out and like I said provide plenty of jobs to the area. This is a festival and this is what happens at them, people can't be bothered to bnring everything back when they have a 4/5day hangover. People saying they should provide plots with the tickets etc are so over the top. People would just swap around and the festival doesnd';t want to ban it's customers for just leaving whatever they can't take with them afterwards behind. What are they supposed to do? Put it in a bin? This is part of every festival and they plan for it and allocate part of their budget to the cleanup as well so I don't knwo why this is such a big thing all of a sudden when it happens every year.

I wonder how much money was dropped. I'd happily volunteer if it meant finders-keepers