Tent tax - good idea?

[Jay Pee]

https://www.billygoats.co.uk/

From small acorns etc...

[JoBalls]

Maybe rather than everyone bringing their own tent, GF can just erect a giant John Peel sized tent in each campsite and we can all share? ?

[Quark]

31 minutes ago, JoBalls said:

Maybe rather than everyone bringing their own tent, GF can just erect a giant John Peel sized tent in each campsite and we can all share? ?

Clearly you've never tried to sleep anywhere near me. Booze + party treats + a sizeable and oft-broken hooter do not a quiet kip make

[Lycra]

12 hours ago, hfuhruhurr said:

I attend the reading council & festival republic post festival meeting in December.  Any proposed schemes that would cause tents to be dumped outside the festival and all over the town/countryside have been rejected.

Education and guilt re: other plastics are the most effective solutions. Won't catch all but as we've seen at gf it works well enough.

Good point. Those who aren't bothered about a refund will still leave their gear whilst those who do will claim a refund at the exit gate, then dump their tent in the car/coach park. Spreads the littering.

[Hugh Jass]

I smell a potential money spinner in picking up abandoned tents and taking them to the gate for a refund.

[stuie]

14 hours ago, BlueDaze said:

i am amazed that GF havent set up an on site Worthy View yet. It seems the next logical step.

If the first sale was coach + pre-erected Pennards they would sell out in no time.*

 

 

* this bullshit idea is bought to you by a caravan dwelling East CV'er

Maybe this is the start of that very idea!?

 

 

[Hugh Jass]

I remember seeing a piece on here about festivals using pre-erected cardboard tents that could survive almost all weather conditions - is this something that could be looked at? Maybe give over a field or two to these?

[maelzoid]

16 hours ago, Benja100 said:

All the schemes listed so far are unworkable. 

Even as I was typing mine out, I understood it was unworkable... But I think if we start from a point of it being unworkable and just give up there, we'll never get anything done. Maybe throwing around ideas will inspire some better solutions and eventually we will get there.

[eFestivals]

44 minutes ago, Hugh Jass said:

I remember seeing a piece on here about festivals using pre-erected cardboard tents that could survive almost all weather conditions - is this something that could be looked at? Maybe give over a field or two to these?

I think pushing another disposable solution isn't the solution to a problem of the disposable. 

The same problem exists around plastic recycling, which ultimately only encourages more plastic to be produced when we need to be doing all we can to stop further plastic being produced.

Recycling is only part of the answer when it's not encouraging ever-greater consumption.

Edited August 30, 2019 by eFestivals

[fred quimby]

35 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

I think pushing another disposable solution isn't the solution to a problem of the disposable. 

The same problem exists around plastic recycling, which ultimately only encourages more plastic to be produced when we need to be doing all we can to stop further plastic being produced.

Recycling is only part of the answer when it's not encouraging ever-greater consumption.

They are cardboard though and compostable. There is a small amount of re-useable plastic tags on them (used for the next lot of cardboard tents). so very much like all the plates and forks the festival insist on. Now obviously you have the energy costs of producing them.

Trouble is from what I have seen is that they are all rather small single person tents. Should improve though over time.

So could work but education is still the way forward for now.

[eFestivals]

33 minutes ago, fred quimby said:

They are cardboard though and compostable. There is a small amount of re-useable plastic tags on them (used for the next lot of cardboard tents). so very much like all the plates and forks the festival insist on. Now obviously you have the energy costs of producing them.

the difference is that plates and forks can't realistically be anything else but disposable at a festival.

Where there's a realistic alternative to disposable we shouldn't be doing the disposable - and particularly not opening up new ways to make disposable an OK thing.

 

Quote

education is still the way forward for now.

it's the only way forward.

Unfortunately the whole recycling thing is being used as way to avoid the necessary education. There's a pretence that recycling has it covered.

Edited August 30, 2019 by eFestivals

[BlueDaze]

19 hours ago, BlueDaze said:

i am amazed that GF havent set up an on site Worthy View yet. It seems the next logical step.

If the first sale was coach + pre-erected Pennards they would sell out in no time.*

 

 

* this bullshit idea is bought to you by a caravan dwelling East CV'er

 

4 hours ago, stuie said:

Maybe this is the start of that very idea!?

 

 

There you go.... 500 tents in 2021

[grilladelphia]

get security to roam the campsites and threaten people who leave their tents on the last day? and get the circa 2008 scary Reading Fest security to do it (I was once threatened to be kicked out, but I would be going "straight to a&e" I was told!)

its not a perfect solution.

[Make Mondays Better]

On 8/29/2019 at 8:42 PM, hfuhruhurr said:

I attend the reading council & festival republic post festival meeting in December.  Any proposed schemes that would cause tents to be dumped outside the festival and all over the town/countryside have been rejected.

Education and guilt re: other plastics are the most effective solutions. Won't catch all but as we've seen at gf it works well enough.

Ooh, can you tell me more about this meeting? Is it open to the public? I have ideas!

[Make Mondays Better]

What about if every camper pays a bond of £50, and a percentage is returned based on the approximate percentage of tents taken home overall (e.g. 50% of people take their tents home and everyone gets £25 returned). It might foster an environment where people encourage & help each other to clear up. The remainder of the bond is used to fund other, less cost-effective, initiatives to reduce waste.

To combat problems mentioned already: create areas by the exits where people who have no intention of carrying their tents any further can leave them to be picked up by charities such as FWRD (Festival Waste Reclamation and Distribution). I volunteered with them this year - if all they had to do was pick up the ready-packed tents rather than clear them out AND disassemble them AND stuff them back into their stupidly small carry bags we could reclaim and donate so much more stuff. Also place scrap metal skips for the broken / heavily soiled tents.

[Hugh Jass]

1 minute ago, Make Mondays Better said:

What about if every camper pays a bond of £50, and a percentage is returned based on the approximate percentage of tents taken home overall (e.g. 50% of people take their tents home and everyone gets £25 returned). It might foster an environment where people encourage & help each other to clear up. The remainder of the bond is used to fund other, less cost-effective, initiatives to reduce waste.

To combat problems mentioned already: create areas by the exits where people who have no intention of carrying their tents any further can leave them to be picked up by charities such as FWRD (Festival Waste Reclamation and Distribution). I volunteered with them this year - if all they had to do was pick up the ready-packed tents rather than clear them out AND disassemble them AND stuff them back into their stupidly small carry bags we could reclaim and donate so much more stuff. Also place scrap metal skips for the broken / heavily soiled tents.

Problem is though that people who are prepared to carry their tents as far as the exit are likely to carry them all the way to their cars/coaches.

It’s those who aren’t prepared to carry at all who are the problem.

[DeanoL]

We already pay a tent tax: festivals pay someone to clean up after us and that money comes out of the ticket price.

Glasto is interesting as if they get to make that cheaper, more money goes to charity.

[Make Mondays Better]

11 hours ago, DeanoL said:

We already pay a tent tax: festivals pay someone to clean up after us and that money comes out of the ticket price.

Glasto is interesting as if they get to make that cheaper, more money goes to charity.

This is a fairly depressing way to look at it - if everyone tidied up their own mess they wouldn't have to pay for armies of litter pickers and heavy machinery to clear the site and they could spend that money on stuff that made the festival better, like ice machines or space-hoppers or something (I don't know if those things would actually make a festival better but you get the idea). Or the festival would have been cheaper in the first place. 

Also, yes the festival pays people to clear up but I would say they do it in a fairly unsatisfactory way - with everything getting incinerated or landfilled instead of recycled or reused (with the exception of the tiny fraction that can be salvaged by what is a very small number of volunteers compared to the amount of waste left behind - at festivals other than G'bury this year).  

[Neville Street]

When WV was launched ME said he could see a point in the not so distant future when pre-erected reusable tents across the site were the norm (apologies if this has already been covered, I only read the last page or 2).

Maybe at some point things flip around and if you want to bring your own you pay extra and have certain areas of the site available for "pitch your own", but the normal tickets include pre-erected tents of various sizes/groupings. Like the other "unworkable" ideas, perhaps this goes into the ideas pot for how to get us to a more consistent "Leave No Trace".

[DeanoL]

Pre-errected tents help the environment, but not so much the festival. All those tents will need cleaning and dismantling, which is more work than just pulling down and trashing other people's. 

[hfuhruhurr]

On 8/31/2019 at 10:42 PM, Make Mondays Better said:

Ooh, can you tell me more about this meeting? Is it open to the public? I have ideas!

Sorry, it's a closed meeting, but if you have ideas then let me know, I can put them forward.

[stuie]

3 hours ago, DeanoL said:

Pre-errected tents help the environment, but not so much the festival. All those tents will need cleaning and dismantling, which is more work than just pulling down and trashing other people's. 

At a price of between £295 and £1100 I think the festival can afford the costs to clean and dismantle them!

[DeanoL]

2 hours ago, stuie said:

At a price of between £295 and £1100 I think the festival can afford the costs to clean and dismantle them!

Yeah but I assume Eavis' "all pre-errected tents" plan didn't come with increasing the ticket price to £600

[stuie]

55 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Yeah but I assume Eavis' "all pre-errected tents" plan didn't come with increasing the ticket price to £600

I don't see them being cheaper than WV.  WV is off site and up a bastard hill so surely they'd be more expensive on the prime festival land?

[giantkatestacks]

I was at the Reading site post-festival and most of the tents left were extremely cheap. They weren't trashed for the most part either which was good. The more expensive ones left were trashed as presumably that was why they were left.

The tents weren't the grimmest part for me but the general litter that people just leave - they have been literally living in sht all weekend and then they just get up and leave at the end of it leaving food, clothes, camping equipment, all sorts of stuff.

Following behind us was an army of litter pickers and behind that was a bulldozer that just pushed and picked everything up and dumped it in a massive lorry for landfill.