Eco bond for litter collection at Boomtown. Something for Glasto?

[muddychick]

I was just having a look at their website and see that Boomtown do this......... 

EcoBond (litter deposit)

Part of the 'Keep BoomTown Tidy' scheme, a £10 deposit is added on to each Adult or Teen ticket and is refunded in cash on site when a bag of rubbish or recycling is handed in to the EcoBond depot. For more details, please click here.

Not the worst idea in the world for Glastonbury to consider.  

[Nobody Interesting]

I see no reason why not. Loads would not bother to get the £10 back as they don't exactly care about money (leaving tents etc behind) but at least it would encourage others to clean up maybe a bit more and those £10's left behind can help pay for the clean up.

[muddychick]

My thoughts exactly. I think that physically paying an extra tenner may hit home a little more than signing a pledge.

[incident]

It'd penalise me personally and presumably others.. I just don't generate anywhere near enough waste it seems - When I pack up for the weekend I'll end up taking a supermarket carrier bag (and usually less than half full) to the rubbish pens and still leave nothing behind.. Not especially keen on having to go round cleaning up after other people just fill a bin bag to get my deposit back. Any other waste generated (food etc) over the weekend goes in the nearest bin at the time.

[Cooter]

Sounds good but at Glasto (being a lot larger) maybe better for a tenner in exchange for more than one bag, maybe 5?

And limit the time between Sunday 10pm til Monday 12pm or some will be grabbing bags from bin areas all weekend and just leaving their crap behind as normal Monday morning.

Edited July 8, 2016 by Cooter

[DeanoL]

4 hours ago, Cooter said:

Sounds good but at Glasto (being a lot larger) maybe better for a tenner in exchange for more than one bag, maybe 5?

If you're generating five bags full of rubbish at your campsite over five days at Glastonbury, I'd respectfully suggest from an environmental point of view, you are the problem!

[Larraht]

I have heard people report that when going to festivals which use this sort of deal it tends to create large queues which may put people off collecting their tenner (I know I wouldn't queue for an hour for a tenner...but then I'm not really the problem as I always dispose of all rubbish properly).

I went to Vfest (ewww..) many moons ago and you could collect rubbish or recycle cups etc at a point and exchange it for merchandise. Now...I would quite happily collect a few bags of rubbish for a limited edition glastonbury t-shirt or something? With the popularity of Yeo valley bags/guardian bags/glastonbury free press, it seems anything collectible would go down well.

Edited July 8, 2016 by Larraht

[DeanoL]

3 minutes ago, Larraht said:

I went to Vfest (ewww..) many moons ago and you could collect rubbish or recycle cups etc at a point and exchange it for merchandise. Now...I would quite happily collect a few bags of rubbish for a limited edition glastonbury t-shirt or something? With the popularity of Yeo valley bags/guardian bags/glastonbury free press, it seems anything collectible would go down well.

Glastonbury has litter-pickers for that though, who I believe are volunteers for Oxfam. So instead of getting a t-shirt, Oxfam gets a bunch of money. That's probably preferable than funnelling that cash to punters via t-shirts no?

It's similar with the eco-bond, in that ten quid of your ticket price probably does get spent on clean-up. There's just no way to get it back, it all goes to the professional clean-up crew they hire.

[marcoolio]

41 minutes ago, Larraht said:

I would quite happily collect a few bags of rubbish for a limited edition glastonbury t-shirt or something? 

Arcadia does just that,  offering a free T-shirt to anyone who collects three full bags of recycling.

[pie_and_a_pint]

39 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Glastonbury has litter-pickers for that though, who I believe are volunteers for Oxfam. So instead of getting a t-shirt, Oxfam gets a bunch of money. 

Glastonbury has hundreds of litterpickers. We all work for a variety of charities (we donate some/all of our deposits) plus we wear tshirts while we work to raise awareness, not that any other fuckers are awake at that ungodly hour...  

Oxfam provides stewards, not litterpickers.

[pie_and_a_pint]

Just now, pie_and_a_pint said:

 

Duplicate, sorry

Edited July 8, 2016 by pie_and_a_pint

[djdavejohnson]

Could a similar system be deployed for tents? Although I assume a tenner would be unlikely to sway most of those that leave their tent behind. 

[themuel]

14 hours ago, incident said:

It'd penalise me personally and presumably others.. I just don't generate anywhere near enough waste it seems - When I pack up for the weekend I'll end up taking a supermarket carrier bag (and usually less than half full) to the rubbish pens and still leave nothing behind.. Not especially keen on having to go round cleaning up after other people just fill a bin bag to get my deposit back. Any other waste generated (food etc) over the weekend goes in the nearest bin at the time.

That's the whole point. Other people shouldn't need picking up after but sadly they do so this system works. And you can fill a black bag in minutes. 

[Dave_c]

I think they should do it on registrations. Return a bag of litter/recycling and you can come again. Don't and your registration is banned for 2 years.

[Nobody Interesting]

15 hours ago, incident said:

It'd penalise me personally and presumably others.. I just don't generate anywhere near enough waste it seems - When I pack up for the weekend I'll end up taking a supermarket carrier bag (and usually less than half full) to the rubbish pens and still leave nothing behind.. Not especially keen on having to go round cleaning up after other people just fill a bin bag to get my deposit back. Any other waste generated (food etc) over the weekend goes in the nearest bin at the time.

They have this scheme at Shambala as well and have adjusted it with the introduction of a Green camping area, to account for those with little or no waste and it worked perfectly.

[DeanoL]

3 hours ago, Dave_c said:

I think they should do it on registrations. Return a bag of litter/recycling and you can come again. Don't and your registration is banned for 2 years.

But you can just re-register.

[incident]

3 hours ago, themuel said:

That's the whole point. Other people shouldn't need picking up after but sadly they do so this system works. And you can fill a black bag in minutes. 

For me at least it'd probably have the reverse effect than intended.

I'd never get round to filling a bag with other peoples waste (not for the sake of £10 anyway), and so would be penalised for being tidy. On that basis, why should I bother to be tidy? For me this scheme would be a green light to drop whatever the hell you like wherever the hell you like, after all you're paying for the right to do so.

[themuel]

1 hour ago, incident said:

For me at least it'd probably have the reverse effect than intended.

I'd never get round to filling a bag with other peoples waste (not for the sake of £10 anyway), and so would be penalised for being tidy. On that basis, why should I bother to be tidy? For me this scheme would be a green light to drop whatever the hell you like wherever the hell you like, after all you're paying for the right to do so.

That is an attitude I just can't get my head around. 

[Cornelius_Fudge]

I like the idea that everyone could fill up one bag of rubbish throughout the weekend and get a fiver or tenner back. It really wouldn't take long and if everyone pitched in together it might also raise awareness that we can't just chuck our cups and plates and plastic bags wherever we wanted if we understood that we're just contributing to our own problem. 

At other festivals too they have a deposit scheme for drinks cups you get from the bars.  £2 for a recycled hard plastic cup that you can potentially use over and over privately or in the bars until you're finished with it and get your money back. Festivals such as Nos Primavera in Porto do it and they have next to zero waste left over from paper cups etc. 

The cost of the cups means no one wants to throw them away or you'd be losing an extra 20 quid a day for no reason. 

 

[incident]

2 hours ago, themuel said:

That is an attitude I just can't get my head around. 

It seems fairly simple - I currently clean up after myself, and am happy to do so - it's the right thing to do

If you're going to start implementing a penalty like this, for those of us who aren't generating anywhere near that volume of waste to start with the choices ultimately come down to - generate more waste, clean up after others, or forfeit the "deposit". I'm not going to generate more waste, and my time is worth more than £10 so I'm not going to clean up other peoples mess.

So ultimately, under a scheme like this I'm almost certainly going to be paying a messy bastard penalty despite being less so than most - you can't see how that would be counter productive?

Now ultimately in my case I'd probably carry on the exact same as before, but I'd certainly feel wronged by it.

[DeanoL]

Yeah I think the upshot of it would actually be more mess. Same way tents get left behind because convince themselves they'll be donated to charity, so they don't feel bad about it. Same thing here, it feels like the ten quid is basically paying for someone to clean up after you.

[fur_q]

Anyone with even a basic knowledge of social sciences would recognise those as an almost classic example of the boomerang effect, whereby the result of an intervention is actually the opposite of that intended. 

 

If if people feel they're paying a £10 charge for cleaning up their rubbish they're more likly to leave it as they'll feel that they've paid to mitigate the negative effects of their actions. 

[themuel]

Interestingly given the above, boomtown was one of the tidiest festivals I've been too with people cleaning up. 

[muddychick]

55 minutes ago, themuel said:

Interestingly given the above, boomtown was one of the tidiest festivals I've been too with people cleaning up. 

I was just about to ask if anyone has experience of this when i read your reply. I would like to think it would generate some awareness.

I saw one of the cup reimbursement schemes at camp bestival where you got money back for returning a paper cup. I hardly saw any cups on the ground all weekend as kids were collecting them for the money. 

[Nobody Interesting]

Shambala was also very tidy and runs the same scheme.