What have you seen at other festivals that could work for Glasto?

[shuttlep]

The loop

 

[squirrelarmy]

8 minutes ago, BOBBY_FIRMINO said:

Those plastic cups make great souvenirs, got loads in at home from festivals / gigs / football matches abroad. Got ones which are still fine today after years of runs in the dishwasher

Problem of having them here is the english are absolute slobs so most would still end up on the floor (probably full of piss)

That’s why you need to attach a monetary value to the plastic cup. If you know the price of your pint varies depending on if you bring your cup back or not people will take more care of them. Also for every person who doesn’t care about paying an extra £1 or so for their pint there will be plenty who see a discarded cup on the floor as a discounted beer next time. 

[august1]

Foals headlining

[johnmcga]

End of the Road had a good improvement on the branded plastic cup thing this year, I thought. 

Rather than have cups with nice illustrations / branding on, which tend to get taken home by people and then left in cupboards, they hired in loads of generic, reusable plastic pint cups.

They then operated the same approach as described: £1 to purchase a cup (I think), and then each time you got a beer you swapped your dirty old cup for a clean one.

The main extra benefit is that the cups get reused again and again and again at other events. Apparently it's the first year they've used hired cups, so I hope it worked out for them.

I feel like this could work at Glastonbury, if they could get the logistics sorted of washing and redistributing cups at the scale required!

[Barneym]

26 minutes ago, shuttlep said:

The loop

 

Couldn’t agree more, such a valuable service and should be part of the licence for every festival in my opinion (although I’m slightly worried that if they get agreement to have them it will come with some stupid terms like the need to have dogs on the gate

[glasto-worker]

2 hours ago, squirrelarmy said:

If people are bringing their own cup to the bar how are they managing the licensing issue? Beer has to be sold in multiples of halves/3rds or full pints. Having a container the right size is essential, they also need to have the volume marked on order to be legal if the beer is being free poured or the amount of beer being issued has to be dispensed by a machine I can't remember seeing the automatic ones but hopefully someone who worked on a Glasto bar can confirm if this is the case or not.

 

2 hours ago, Quark said:

It is still frustrating when bars are just pouring a pre-filled disposable cup into my steel one and then binning it anyway.  I get the need to have a quick turnaround, but there must be a better way of doing it.

Maybe having separate queues for with / without cup?  If you go with cup, instead of using disposables they have reusable pre-filled measuring cups they can just decant into your steel cup, that then get added back into the pile and refilled for the next punter. Would get around the licensing / measurement issue that way.

@glasto-worker you're the font of knowledge for the bar setups. Any massive reason something like that wouldn't work that I'm  missing?

They are called MDU's {Multi Dispense Units} but because of the space required for all the machinery they are not in every Bar.

Here is a photo that many will not have seen before - the glass container contains 1/2 pint which is inspected by weights and measures ' before any bar is open to the Public ' { they take a sample from each unit } - provided its set up correctly it will pour exactly 1 pint.Each MDU will pour 10 or 12 Pints at a time.

GFL was asked by the WBC  some Years ago if they could use their own ' Reusable Cups ' { as used at Latitude for many years } which would have a £1 deposit but that was rejected by GFL for reasons unknown.

Now while that cuts down on waste as most people will return their cups { or keep them as souvenirs } there is a Big problem as all the Reusable Cups have to be sterilised before they can be used again and that has to be done after the festival so it does require a lot more space to store all the used Cups. 

With regards people bringing up their own Cups the WBC was advised by their Solicitors that to stay within the law with regards contamination ' the customer would have to fill up their own cup themselves '

I have worked in festival bars for many years and while I was against MDU's at the start there is no question it has speeded up the whole process.

[squirrelarmy]

So the problem is getting the liquid from the MDU to the customer without using single use plastics or their own container due to hygiene reasons. 
 

The most environmentally friendly option is to either switch to cans or the reusable plastic cup. 
 

Plastic only becomes a problem when it is no longer needed. It’s an incredibly useful material, as long as it keeps in use then waste becomes minimal. I’m not an expert in chemistry but if it was possible to make the festival cups from recycled plastic then I could see the green backers of Glastonbury supporting that move. 

[Tommy Dickfingers]

1 hour ago, chazwwe said:

This would encourage people to leave their stuff/trash it from what I've seen at other festivals that do this. Its more waste/stuff being left at the festival and is kinda counterproductive to what they've been trying to do. 

Leave what exactly? You aren’t bringing owt with you that’s my point. 

[squirrelarmy]

1 minute ago, Tommy Dickfingers said:

Leave what exactly? You aren’t bringing owt with you that’s my point. 

I think he means people will buy camping stuff onsite and leave it behind. 
 

The only way to cut down on people doing that would be more recycling points for those who don’t want to take their stuff home. Although not much of a problem with this festival compared to others. 
 

Personally I’d like to be able to buy an airbed onsite then I can take it back home in my bag in the space that was previously taken up by beer. Either that or having more options to buy cold cans on site which which means I don’t have to carry as much beer with me to the festival.
 

Anything that reduces the amount of stuff needed to carry on a coach is a plus. 

[PDAD]

1 hour ago, shuttlep said:

The loop

 

Fully agreed. Such a shame Boomtown had difficulty in getting it back this year - it seems there is just so much red tape for obvious reasons. 

[Tommy Dickfingers]

3 minutes ago, squirrelarmy said:

I think he means people will buy camping stuff onsite and leave it behind. 
 

The only way to cut down on people doing that would be more recycling points for those who don’t want to take their stuff home. Although not much of a problem with this festival compared to others. 
 

Personally I’d like to be able to buy an airbed onsite then I can take it back home in my bag in the space that was previously taken up by beer. Either that or having more options to buy cold cans on site which which means I don’t have to carry as much beer with me to the festival.
 

Anything that reduces the amount of stuff needed to carry on a coach is a plus. 

I meant you rented the air bed/sleeping bag/pillow as well as the tent. So you can turn up with a bag of clothes and off you go. 

[squirrelarmy]

4 minutes ago, Tommy Dickfingers said:

I meant you rented the air bed/sleeping bag/pillow as well as the tent. So you can turn up with a bag of clothes and off you go. 

Not sure how many people would rent a sleeping bag. Think airbeds would probably be the limit people will be comfortable with. Having somewhere to fill them helps too. 

[Northtim]

I loved the Steel Cups but agree with others it was frustrating they had to be filled by pouring from a paper pint cup.

On other ideas - I'd like to see Other Stage get the big screens that were used at Reading this year

 

 

[dingbat2]

80s electronic acts... e.g

Gary Numan

OMD

John Foxx

Human League

Tears for Fears

[Tommy Dickfingers]

3 minutes ago, squirrelarmy said:

Not sure how many people would rent a sleeping bag. Think airbeds would probably be the limit people will be comfortable with. Having somewhere to fill them helps too. 

Why wouldn’t you rent a sleeping bag? It’ll be new! You just leave it in your tent after for the festival to donate somewhere. 

I’ll expand on my idea. You’d pay say 300 quid and you’d be able to use a tent, sleeping bag, air bed and pillow. They’d be pumped up all ready for you when you got there. 

 

[squirrelarmy]

1 minute ago, Tommy Dickfingers said:

Why wouldn’t you rent a sleeping bag? It’ll be new! You just leave it in your tent after for the festival to donate somewhere. 

I’ll expand on my idea. You’d pay say 300 quid and you’d be able to use a tent, sleeping bag, air bed and pillow. They’d be pumped up all ready for you when you got there. 

 

For £300 you’d might as well stick with Worthy View or similar. 

[MrZigster]

Re reusable pint pots : Four time bar volunteer here. As others have stated, it's the cross contamination problem that is the issue. If you hand me your mug that you have been drinking out of and I then, despite taking care not to,  proceed to touch the pouring spout with it as I am pouring your drink, then that's your germs all over said spout and potentially also in the next x amount of pints served.  The solution to this, which is to use a separate measuring cup, is that said measuring cup will inevitably just be another generic wax lined paper pint cup and will be thrown straight in the bin afterwards, which surely defeats the point of the exercise.

So how about the £1 extra for your first plastic pint cup and you get a fresh replacement cup each time? Well where are all of those cups going to get washed up? I worked in one of the bigger bars this year and we basically just had one tiny double sink. One side for hand washing and the other side for washing up (and it didn't take long for the sign stating which was which to fall down/disappear). Along with a tiny boiler that didn't even hold enough hot water to adequately clean all of the Pimms/water jugs at the end of the shift (I personally am now very wary of drinking anything served from a jug at Glastonbury now).

Short of sending said cups off site, or insisting that every bar only uses steel measuring cups (which would, effectively, double the time it takes to pour each drink (as you are pouring it twice), and would probably mean the same measuring cups being used over and over all day, which brings its own hygiene issues), I'm not sure what the solution could be. Possibly just be best to stick to the bio degradable cups?

[Quark]

4 hours ago, glasto-worker said:

 

They are called MDU's {Multi Dispense Units} but because of the space required for all the machinery they are not in every Bar.

Here is a photo that many will not have seen before - the glass container contains 1/2 pint which is inspected by weights and measures ' before any bar is open to the Public ' { they take a sample from each unit } - provided its set up correctly it will pour exactly 1 pint.Each MDU will pour 10 or 12 Pints at a time.

GFL was asked by the WBC  some Years ago if they could use their own ' Reusable Cups ' { as used at Latitude for many years } which would have a £1 deposit but that was rejected by GFL for reasons unknown.

Now while that cuts down on waste as most people will return their cups { or keep them as souvenirs } there is a Big problem as all the Reusable Cups have to be sterilised before they can be used again and that has to be done after the festival so it does require a lot more space to store all the used Cups. 

With regards people bringing up their own Cups the WBC was advised by their Solicitors that to stay within the law with regards contamination ' the customer would have to fill up their own cup themselves '

I have worked in festival bars for many years and while I was against MDU's at the start there is no question it has speeded up the whole process.

 

Comprehensive as ever!

So would the need to sterilise every time also apply if a plastic cup was used by bar staff purely to pour into my steel cup? 

[jj200]

Fall out boy and twenty one pilots playing.

[TheDayman]

Probably not as necessary now that Glasto has banned single use plastic but at a lot of festivals in Ireland there are plastic cup drop off points where you can exchange the used plastic cups for cash.

Now most of the younger kids spend time running around collecting as many cups as they can carry and trading them so that they can buy ice creams, sweets, face painting, fun fair rides, etc., etc. They appear to love it and it also teaches them some really good lessons too

[Gilgamesh69]

At Roskilde (maybe others) they have a pit system for the main stage. At the start of each day, they hand out wristbands for each of the acts playing the main stage that day. You collect the wristband, then later on you can use that to get in the front area for that act (think it opens about 30 mins before their set). You can also try your luck and queue up even of you don't have a wristband; if there's enough space they'll let you in. Once the set has finished, the pit is emptied.

 

It's good because it means you don't have to worry too much about getting a good spot, and it means there aren't people right at the front waiting all day just for one act they love later in the day. If you're at the front then chances are everyone around you loves the act playing, giving it a much better atmosphere

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

Plenty of the bars were selling cans or pints of Carlsberg for exactly £5, yet it was so hot the queues in a lot of the bars were savagely long. During the day we mostly drank beer and had cash, we’d queue for about 20/30 minutes only for the transaction of buying pre poured pints with cash to take approximately 10 seconds.

Basically what I’m saying is in particularly hot years such as this year, there should be an easier quicker way (separate queue perhaps) to order pints that are effectively already poured and just sitting their waiting to be bought.

[Badlands]

3 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

Plenty of the bars were selling cans or pints of Carlsberg for exactly £5, yet it was so hot the queues in a lot of the bars were savagely long. During the day we mostly drank beer and had cash, we’d queue for about 20/30 minutes only for the transaction of buying pre poured pints with cash to take approximately 10 seconds.

Basically what I’m saying is in particularly hot years such as this year, there should be an easier quicker way (separate queue perhaps) to order pints that are effectively already poured and just sitting their waiting to be bought.

Where were you queueing for 30 minutes out of curiosity?? Cannot recall ever waiting that long. Big old place obviously with lots of different bars, but other than pyramid at dusk I rarely encounter long queues.

[Supernintendo Chalmers]

Deck the whole place out in fake grass like Mad Cool

[chazwwe]

4 hours ago, Northtim said:

I loved the Steel Cups but agree with others it was frustrating they had to be filled by pouring from a paper pint cup.

On other ideas - I'd like to see Other Stage get the big screens that were used at Reading this year

Gotta agree with the screens, the footage that I've seen looks phenomenal from them. Would give the stage a bigger feel too. I also think the Pyramid could use with some bigger/vertical screens too, but thats just me.