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LEAVE NO TRACE


hermano
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First timer here.  I was watching Glastonbury videos on Youtube and I cam across this one showing the aftermath of tents and camping equipment left behind. It really upset me and sickened me. Not only is disgustingly messy and wasteful, but those are some huge, expensive tents that people have left behind. £100s of camping equipment just left behind. I can't believe that people can leave behind so much stuff - do they really have that much money to burn? 

I am worried that I will have to put my teacher voice on, on Monday morning and tell these naughty boys and girls off. What is one to do? :(

 

 

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We can try our best to make it better.

I think we need to make leaving tents more of a social taboo, in the same way drink driving is publicly reviled in a way it didn't used to be.

Try to fit it in to conversations you have with strangers, how abhorrent you find it.

Practice "Leave No Trace +1" in which you pick up at least one piece of rubbish that isn't your own every day, and introduce the concept to others.

Make yourself leave no trace at the festival, allow the festival to leave a massive trace in yourself. :wub:

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seen this video before but i still find it shocking, some of those tens would be worth a bit too, its not like they're cheap tents and other than a bit of mud, they're generally still in decent condition

every year i think about returning to the site once ive loaded my car with my own stuff to scavenge for free chairs/tents etc but never have done, maybe this year!

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There will always be those people either too wrecked or too ignorant to take away their tents from a festival. The really cheap ones especially are almost sold with single use in mind. 

Maybe better promotion can be done for the people recycling tents on site, possibly better options for purchasing a tent on site with the option for money back on the tent if you return it to where you bought it. 

It's not going to prevent those people leaving tents but anything that can encourage them to recycle them will make things a lot better for those people left to clear the site afterwards.

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Going back a few years, the message about cleaning up after yourself was more strongly enforced.  In the breaks between bands on bigger stages they passed out bags and got folks to clean up the space around where they were sitting.  

More recently they seem to focus on getting you to sign up to that pledge, focussing on the peeing and the clean up crews (well that's the bit I see). 

This may be to simplify the message, maybe the bags of rubbish fed into other problems, I'm not sure. 

Those folks certainly earn whatever their part of the bargain is, that's for sure, as people can be pretty grim sometimes. 

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It makes me so mad! Use it put it in a bin or take it home with you! Without those fields the fedtival wont happen year after year! Being a farming lass the festival needs the fields the fields need the animals the animals need the fields and the festival needs the field! Please look after the site its only ours for a week! Leave no trace! 

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3 minutes ago, Dave_c said:

Lazy ignorant B******s if you ask me. I don't understand some people. Must be the same folk that shit all over public toilets and just leave it for someone else to deal with. Really riles me.

Quite agree.

Ignorant lazy pointless idiots do this sort of thing. My neighbours kids go to festivals and probably dump their stuff - Dad dumps crap all over his garden so they have never been taught to clear up and one of the kids throws their fast food wrappers out his car windows 100 yards down the road rather than take them home!

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The video is by the lovely @ian the worm, and it's a timely reminder that this kind of littering is not only disgraceful but also puts the festival at risk.

I left the site after 4pm on the Monday last year and the amount of tents and equipment left behind on the other side of the site (Big Ground / Kidney Mead) was breathtaking. Even aside from the sheer audacity of people leaving hundreds of pounds worth of crap behind on the land of someone who's kindly hosted the world's biggest and bestest party for five days, there's also the issue that much of this perfectly good kit will go to landfill. There are children in refugee zones who don't have shelter, yet someone has abandoned a £300 tent that they've used for three or four nights. Furthermore, most tents are made from plastics, which come from oil - as a planet we are running out of resources such as oil. We shouldn't be wasting those precious resources on something that's thrown away. The message that camping equipment is not emphemeral really hasn't made to enough festival-goers, though.

(incidentally, as an example of the breathtakingly entitled attitude of some people: I'm a litterpicker, as you know. Last year I was asked by a young well-spoken man on the campsite near to John Peel when we were going to 'come in the clean up their campsite'. You will have to imagine the response I gave him as I think Neil would ban me for repeated use of offensive language if I repeated it here, but suffice to say he ended the conversation with a clearer idea of the fact that he was supposed to clean up his own mess).

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It would be great if the festival could make more of a big deal about this. I know towards the end of the odd email they send it mentions Leave No Trace, and there's a tick box for the pledge when buying tickets that most people don't bother reading, but the festival could/should send weekly emails/facebook/twitter/instagram posts about the crap left behind. loads of people still think that tents just left there get taken down and donated to charities.

if the festival put up photos on fb/twitter/instagram every few days of all the rubbish and crap left behind, and posted telling people that tents left behind in fields are not donated to charity, over and over again, then more people would likely take their rubbish with them, or badger their friends to take things.

same with peeing on the land.

i can't even remember the last time I saw mention of any of them from the festival. maybe at the end of the balance payment email.

and before someone says "oh the festival shouldn't have to, people should just know to do that", well that approach isn't working, so rather than sit around and tut and whinge while the crap piles up, it might be better to actually be a bit more proactive about the situation.

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1 hour ago, ian the worm said:

The thing that pisses me off the most is that after getting nearly 750,000 views I've only earned £73 from it.

Take everything home folks and share my vid please. I want at least 1 million views before I can die happy.

xx

What's your current mood? 

Some of us may settle for you getting to "fair to middling" 

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5 hours ago, hermano said:

First timer here.  I was watching Glastonbury videos on Youtube and I cam across this one showing the aftermath of tents and camping equipment left behind. It really upset me and sickened me. Not only is disgustingly messy and wasteful, but those are some huge, expensive tents that people have left behind. £100s of camping equipment just left behind. I can't believe that people can leave behind so much stuff - do they really have that much money to burn? 

I am worried that I will have to put my teacher voice on, on Monday morning and tell these naughty boys and girls off. What is one to do? :(

 

 

Does the clean up crew check each tent as such for leftover passed out people? This type of mess is the sort of mess homeless meth heads leave behind. I have attended festivals where people throw dozens of cans on the ground at their feet with a garbage bin only meters away. They throw cans and bottles in the port-a-potties as well. Calgary's Folkfest is very recycle conscious with very little litter left behind. I have never been to a festival with attendees camping on site before. But there is absolutely no excuse not to toss your empties while enjoying your day. 

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5 hours ago, squirrelarmy said:

...

Maybe better promotion can be done for the people recycling tents on site, possibly better options for purchasing a tent on site with the option for money back on the tent if you return it to where you bought it. 

...

I think this could be a great idea, could help more people to travel by public transport if they had less to carry too.

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2 hours ago, ian the worm said:

The thing that pisses me off the most is that after getting nearly 750,000 views I've only earned £73 from it.

Take everything home folks and share my vid please. I want at least 1 million views before I can die happy.

xx

How many for you to live happy?

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6 hours ago, hermano said:

First timer here.  I was watching Glastonbury videos on Youtube and I cam across this one showing the aftermath of tents and camping equipment left behind. It really upset me and sickened me. Not only is disgustingly messy and wasteful, but those are some huge, expensive tents that people have left behind. £100s of camping equipment just left behind. I can't believe that people can leave behind so much stuff - do they really have that much money to burn? 

Then pack up their tents and take them with you? If there's an abandoned tent next to you worth £100 and you don't do that you're chucking that £100 away as much as they are.

And if your response is that it's too much effort, well yeah, that's exactly why they're not taking it with them either.

Obviously everyone is responsible for taking their own stuff home, you agree to it when you buy a ticket, but the monetary argument just doesn't work.

 

4 hours ago, pie_and_a_pint said:

The video is by the lovely @ian the worm, and it's a timely reminder that this kind of littering is not only disgraceful but also puts the festival at risk.

No it doesn't. It costs them a lot of money to pay for the clean up but nothing is put at risk. That doesn't make it right, but bullshitting people won't help get them on side.

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7 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Then pack up their tents and take them with you? If there's an abandoned tent next to you worth £100 and you don't do that you're chucking that £100 away as much as they are.

And if your response is that it's too much effort, well yeah, that's exactly why they're not taking it with them either.

Obviously everyone is responsible for taking their own stuff home, you agree to it when you buy a ticket, but the monetary argument just doesn't work.

 

No it doesn't. It costs them a lot of money to pay for the clean up but nothing is put at risk. That doesn't make it right, but bullshitting people won't help get them on side.

That's daft to suggest that not packing up your neighbour's tent up that they bought and have left is the same as you throwing a £100 away. It is a £100 that they spent. 

It is not strictly true to say that nothing is out at risk by us leaving the place looking like a tip. 

At one point does the cost of the cleanup make it not worthwhile? 

Remember we are also leaving tonnes of crap on neighbouring farmer's land. At one point do they make the deal untenable?

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41 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Then pack up their tents and take them with you? If there's an abandoned tent next to you worth £100 and you don't do that you're chucking that £100 away as much as they are.

And if your response is that it's too much effort, well yeah, that's exactly why they're not taking it with them either.

Obviously everyone is responsible for taking their own stuff home, you agree to it when you buy a ticket, but the monetary argument just doesn't work.

 

No it doesn't. It costs them a lot of money to pay for the clean up but nothing is put at risk. That doesn't make it right, but bullshitting people won't help get them on side.

I don't think this argument holds much water. I don't take everyone else's tents home because it's impractical to do so, even if I wasn't traveling by coach. If they brought it in, they can take it out. Unless I hire a driver (not passed my test yet) and a van, I'm not capable of removing any more stuff. And most people have fairly full cars too.

I do agree though that the rubbish isn't an existential threat in the way that the pissing is.

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