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The solution to abandoned tents & waste?


Jack_FM
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18 hours ago, Jack_FM said:

 

I wanted to get your feedback on this as festival-goers. We all know the big problem festivals such as Glasto & Reading have with abandoned tents & general litter post-event… many things have been tried, including getting messages out to the campers about taking their tent home with them, eco-bonds etc. 


 

Wasn't a huge problem at Glastonbury this year, the word was spread well and the masses responded.

This forum is a great example of encouraging people to take their shit home and I'm sure contributed to the success this year.

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From the site:

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To stay in our territory for the festival is only £30 per BassCamper, and if you're booking your crew in too, you can link yourselves on the festival booking page using a common team leader name. 

 

That's all there is to it.

 

This reads to me like it might be a £30 cover charge for access to the area, then extra for the tent...

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Sorry Jack, but have you ever actually been to a festival? Its just so far away from the ethos of any festival I've ever been to, i just cannot see how it would attract any customers. Even if it does, I can't see how your business model would actually return you any profit, the cost of your service would far outweigh the charges made to punters in my opinion. 

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13 hours ago, Ayrshire Chris said:

Vast rows  of identical tents as far as the eye can see?  I’d rather hit a dog shite with a fly mo. 

Excellently put. The conformity of that would be something that you'd expect to see at an event put on for 'the people' in states like North Korea, and not at Europe's largest festival of contemporary performing arts. It would go very much against the grain.

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On 11/10/2019 at 7:50 PM, Jack_FM said:

Note for moderators - I have had permission to post this on this board from Neil at eFestivals.

 

Hi all, 

 

I wanted to get your feedback on this as festival-goers. We all know the big problem festivals such as Glasto & Reading have with abandoned tents & general litter post-event… many things have been tried, including getting messages out to the campers about taking their tent home with them, eco-bonds etc. 

 

It seems to me the only thing that is really going to solve this is having a pre-pitched tent for every camper at the festival. You turn up to a pre-pitched tent, and you just leave it at the end of the festival, packed down & taken away by BassCamp. Through people I’ve talked to in the industry, I think this is what festivals are going to soon introduce as the solution.

 

On the back of this research I’ve set up something called BassCamp as a service that could do this. BassCamp is an affordable pre-pitched service… starting at £20 per person on top of your festival ticket, and grouping friends together in their own tents. The idea is to make it affordable enough that it costs the same to buy a small tent from Amazon, and with BassCamp you'd get a superior quality, larger tent (made from polycotton canvas, which has better insulation than the standard nylon/polyester tents, meaning you'll be warmer at night!). 

To make it attractive we’d try and include things like a bar, campsite social area, silent discos in the campsite. It might eventually look like this:

 

BassCamp.thumb.jpg.ccf43416b37a5acbbd0ff8c8cecea3df.jpg

 

And you can read more about it here: www.basscampuk.com

 

I would love to get your feedback on this. Would you switch to pre-pitched if it was made into an affordable, and attractive experience? If so why, and if not why not? 

 

I know Camplight and Tangerine Fields are the companies already operating in this space… but still the majority of campers opt for standard general camping. I suspect this is because people value the general campsite experience, not wanting to pay the extra money for pre-pitched. So my thinking is to create a pre-pitched service that preserves that general campsite experience, and even adds to it. If you're a fan of this, is there anything you'd like to see added to the campsite experience? 

I’d highly value your comments, positive and negative. Thanks!
 

Jack

 

All a load of bollox old son 

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7 minutes ago, Ayrshire Chris said:

I assume he will add that to the negative comments column, along with every other post on this thread! 

He can put it on in any column he wants it's the truth old son.. That little map of his wouldn't look outa place at a butlins camp site lol

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2 minutes ago, guypjfreak said:

He can put it on in any column he wants it's the truth old son.. That little map of his wouldn't look outa place at a butlins camp site lol

Got to laugh at the bit that says to make it more attractive have a silent disco!  It’s either butlins or a WW2 POW camp layout. 

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Is he ever going to return to respond/thank everyone for their useful feedback?
 

I think a Venn diagram showing people on efestivals and people who would use this service might help to illustrate the demand for the service. 

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14 hours ago, stuie said:

Is he ever going to return to respond/thank everyone for their useful feedback?
 

I think a Venn diagram showing people on efestivals and people who would use this service might help to illustrate the demand for the service. 

Be interesting to see how representative of the entire festival efestivals users are in general. 

There may be more of an appetite amongst ‘normal folk’ who aren’t obsessed like all of us. 

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1 hour ago, Old_Johno said:

Be interesting to see how representative of the entire festival efestivals users are in general. 

There may be more of an appetite amongst ‘normal folk’ who aren’t obsessed like all of us. 

All that's happened in this thread is that the OP, who probably hasn't camped at Glastonbury before, set themselves up to be shot down with that little 'model village' picture.  However, even on this forum, there were some avid flag-wavers for the more bare-bones 'Camplight.'  It was heralded as a green initiative, but the real selling point was clearly that it got late arrivals, and those travelling light, a spot in Pennards.  Pre-pitched in a reasonable spot around the £30 mark will definitely sell out.

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Hi all, 

Thanks for the feedback regarding this. Negative feedback is still valid so it doesn't offend me, but it does make me think harder about what the actual solution might be. As I said, the worst thing would be to spend money building something nobody wants. 

I wasn't the guy on Dragons' Den, although I did watch that pitch and agreed with the Dragons. That solution seemed too complicated and expensive for what it was. 

After speaking to a few in the industry, it is still a huge problem, despite some more positive press surrounding it this year. It's especially damaging to smaller, independent festivals. 

I'll keep digging but clearly this isn't the thing for you, so thanks for letting me know. 

Jack

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10 minutes ago, Jack_FM said:

I'll keep digging...

There is some very specific research you could do to find out if this idea could ever be a goer.  Just find out what happened to 'Camplight' at Glastonbury.  Did the festival pull the plug on their pitch at the popular Pennards Hill camping field, and if so, why?  Did the festival offer them an alternative within the main site?  If so, why did they decide not to take it this year?

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32 minutes ago, Jack_FM said:

After speaking to a few in the industry, it is still a huge problem, despite some more positive press surrounding it this year. It's especially damaging to smaller, independent festivals. 

What's the nature of the problem though? That it costs festivals money to clean it up? Or is it more around meeting council recycling targets?

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On 11/11/2019 at 10:54 AM, merago said:

(Are there people playing basketball in that campsite image?  How shit must that hypothetical festival be that they'd rather play basketball?)

Good spot but you are wrong. Those mornings with nothing on other than chilling/eating/drinking & recuperating i'd pay good money to shoot some hoops at a festival.  We often take a ball/frisbee/hacky for some of the downtime.  I've seen a hoop on the back of camper van before and just wished I had a basketball to hand.  

 

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3 hours ago, DeanoL said:

What's the nature of the problem though? That it costs festivals money to clean it up? Or is it more around meeting council recycling targets?

From the people I've talked to, it's both a financial problem and a desire to be environmentally friendly. Although festivals have done a lot recently to reduce their footprint.  

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3 hours ago, Mark E. Spliff said:

There is some very specific research you could do to find out if this idea could ever be a goer.  Just find out what happened to 'Camplight' at Glastonbury.  Did the festival pull the plug on their pitch at the popular Pennards Hill camping field, and if so, why?  Did the festival offer them an alternative within the main site?  If so, why did they decide not to take it this year?

Good points! Thanks. 

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I can't think this would be a feasible for a festival of Glastonbury's size. If you had 120,000 ticketholders in 80,000 2-man tents, and each tent took 2 people 5 minutes to take up and down, you'd need 320 people working 8 hours a day for 5 days both before and after the festival. And, given the possibility of wind or rain slowing things down considerably, that's a very optimistic estimate.

Perhaps there's a more efficient way of doing things, such as having large tents or other pop-up structures act as hotels with multiple rooms inside. That still runs into problems when you think about a huge festival like Glastonbury though.

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