Article Date:
Author:
Paul Gilbey
With the number of music festivals being hosted in the UK growing by 34 per cent in just four years, organisers are facing increasing pressure to make their festival have as little environmental impact as possible. Campsite waste alone contributes to 86 per cent of total music festival waste, while 71 per cent of this waste can cause ‘lasting land damage to the native flora of the festival sites’. The reduction of waste production is key, as opposed to just recycling as much as possible.
Half of all festival goers have indicated that they would be happy to pay more to attend a greener event. Apart from increasing ticket sales some festivals have employed different tactics to incentivise attendees to adopt greener practices when attending their festivals in the interest of reducing waste. Here are some of the ideas we like:
- Issuing rubbish bags to festival goers on arrival, and add a charge to their tickets, which is refunded if a bag of rubbish is returned at some point during the festival
- Cup deposit schemes are increasingly popular; attendees only get their deposit back if they return the reusable cup
- Special ‘Love Your Tent’ camping fields, where on arrival everyone signs a code of conduct, agreeing to remove all of their belongings when they leave
Reducing environmental impact is a partnership between organiser and attendees. By educating, enabling and incentivising festival goers to adopt greener practices as part of their festival experience, organisers can reduce post event clean up, the impact on the environment and of course, the associated costs.
