Glastonbury is the kingpin of summer festivals, but its hazy, hippie-riddled image has had to adjust in the last few years in order to reconcile its apparently well-intended ethos with the fact that pilling thousands of smoking, drinking, drug taking people into a field for a weekend can produce some rather negative consequences for the environment.
The waste that revelers leave behind is one of the main problems. At Glastonbury, Police have handed out old film canisters to smokers for the last couple of years, encouraging people to use them as portable ashtrays. With each cigarette butt taking fourteen years to biodegrade the remnants of a couple of cheeky puffs can easily outlast an individual's desire to wallow in the mud for a weekend.
People's experience at any festival is determined as much by the weather as the line up. Infamous Glastonbury washouts have been blamed for slower ticket sales this year, but poor weather can also cause people to choose to leave their battle worn festival equipment in the campsites, rather than take it with them. At Roskilde, a festival of a similar size and with a community feel similar to that at Glastonbury, torrential downpours and strong winds combined to make last year's festival less than ideal, and the majority of tents were abandoned in the mud. Organizers spent over one million euro cleaning up after their guests, money that organizers and punters alike would doubtless rather see spent on music or toilets. Everyone forgets or neglects to take their tent pegs, but to combat the environmental problems this causes Millets has specially designed a set which biodegrade.
At Glastonbury there are a team of 'Green Police' who have the powers to ban serious environmental miscreants from the festival for life. The majority of these wrongdoers are caught doing wrong in the river which runs through the site. In 2004 over 4,000 fish died because ammonia levels in the water were so high. Over three days the bladders of revelers can cause a lasting damage to the local ecosystem, with frogs and toads being especially effected by the high levels of ammonia and drugs which enter the water ways.
To try and reduce the event's carbon footprint car share schemes have been set up, as the means by which one arrives at a festival accounts for 80% of each individual's carbon emissions over the course of a three day festival. Greenpeace have provided solar-heated and renewable electricity powered showers for people to clean themselves under.
Festival goers are starting to bring back the spirit with which these big events, and Glastonbury especially, were once unabridged from. To find out more check out A Greener Festival, an excellent website that helps organizers and visitors achieve environmental excellence for their events.
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Posted under Articles, Environmental News
This post was written by Matthew Gammie on June 10, 2008