Love the farm , Leave no Trace

[Magic Toaster]

36 minutes ago, ohyeswellifyouthinkso said:

You say that until your stuck in a half hour queue at a bar waiting for individual cups to be filled. Your friends are waiting for you / a band is about to start.....   I suspect you'd soon change your mind at that point 

 

You have me mistaken for someone who would join a 30 minute queue for drinks...

[Magic Toaster]

20 minutes ago, Quark said:

Selfishly I much prefer my metal cup, keeps the cider colder!

 

Dubious thermodynamics, unless they're dual walled

[clarkete]

1 hour ago, jonnyisRFC said:

I came up with business idea once which solved the “disposable” pint cup at festivals (I won’t bore you all with the details!). I pitched it to a few festival organisers, their man concern with reusable cups is hygiene, for example when Glastonbury trialled the metal reusable pint cup, the beer still had to be poured into a paper cup, and then poured into your metal cup, and then the paper cup got binned. Pointless eh? 

Interesting to hear thanks, did wonder why they were short lived

[gooner1990]

When I went to the Euros in Germany last summer - each stadium charged you whatever price for the pint and then 4 euros for the plastic cup, if you returned it you either got it in cash or refunded back onto the card you paid with.

[The_Fish]

3 minutes ago, gooner1990 said:

When I went to the Euros in Germany last summer - each stadium charged you whatever price for the pint and then 4 euros for the plastic cup, if you returned it you either got it in cash or refunded back onto the card you paid with.

 

Yep, and they washed those plastic glasses and poured another beer in it. 

 

Any empty glasses in the stadium at FT were quickly hoovered up by people who like money. 

[gooner1990]

1 minute ago, The_Fish said:

 

Yep, and they washed those plastic glasses and poured another beer in it. 

 

Any empty glasses in the stadium at FT were quickly hoovered up by people who like money. 

 

Or taken back to England as a souvenir 😉 

[gblock]

13 hours ago, Blownimpression said:

As someone said above, they’ve got to give an incentive to return the cups, either reusable or not. The couple of times I’ve been to Download and they offered 10p or 20p per paper cup returned. So you’d get people walking through the crowd picking up empties and then exchanging them at the booth for cash for their next round/food etc. kept the area tidier.

I think it was 10p last time I went, maybe make it 20p now. You’d imagine this would work pretty well at Glastonbury too with the amount of kids around - they seem to absolutely love it (probably because they can run around while their parents listen to some old fart on the stage & earn a years worth of pocket money in half an hour lol). All the paper cups would get collected and recycled then.

[Quark]

1 hour ago, Magic Toaster said:

 

Dubious thermodynamics, unless they're dual walled

 

Oh it's entirely psychosomatic I'm sure. But I'll take the illusion of being cold if it tricks my brain into not melting 😂

[eivomracsy]

21 minutes ago, gooner1990 said:

When I went to the Euros in Germany last summer - each stadium charged you whatever price for the pint and then 4 euros for the plastic cup, if you returned it you either got it in cash or refunded back onto the card you paid with.

wait what, you don't do that in the uk? how does it work at glasto/in general?

[clasher]

I've been to several events where they charged you for a reusable cup, but then inexplicably (to me at least) limited the amount of cups refunded to 1 per person or 1 per new drink ordered and that just annoyed the hell out of me.

 

Otherwise I think it's a great idea, it would just take some serious planning to make the cleaning and distribution of the cups work on Glasto scale.

[cheesey_toastie]

Picking up the paper cups isn't really the issue. They have the overnight crews and folk that come around in the day. The fields are pretty clean on the whole. 

 

Plastic re-useable sounds great but if there are about 250,000 folk on site (conservatively) and all say have four pints over the festival you've got 1m cups to process and clean. 

 

These guys provide some great stats including the throughput of their machines to actually wash the cups (90000 per machine / day). But that would require some kind of central washing and then redistribution of the cups...

https://www.green-goblet.com/reusable-vs-disposable/

 

The machines obviously take water and power so that's more requirements for the site (and remember we get water shortages already when it's very hot). 

So I think the logistics of re-useable across the board are probably, sadly, quite difficult. 

What I do wonder, and if there's anyone in the know that can answer, are there any benefits to starch / corn cups, are these more "green" that paper, waxed cups - these could then go in the green waste. Bet they are more expensive but with pints at £6-7 could easily be absorbed? Are there even benefits to these I wonder?

[cheesey_toastie]

Just now, cheesey_toastie said:

Picking up the paper cups isn't really the issue. They have the overnight crews and folk that come around in the day. The fields are pretty clean on the whole. 

 

Plastic re-useable sounds great but if there are about 250,000 folk on site (conservatively) and all say have four pints over the festival you've got 1m cups to process and clean. 

 

These guys provide some great stats including the throughput of their machines to actually wash the cups (90000 per machine / day). But that would require some kind of central washing and then redistribution of the cups...

https://www.green-goblet.com/reusable-vs-disposable/

 

The machines obviously take water and power so that's more requirements for the site (and remember we get water shortages already when it's very hot). 

So I think the logistics of re-useable across the board are probably, sadly, quite difficult. 

What I do wonder, and if there's anyone in the know that can answer, are there any benefits to starch / corn cups, are these more "green" that paper, waxed cups - these could then go in the green waste. Bet they are more expensive but with pints at £6-7 could easily be absorbed? Are there even benefits to these I wonder?

As you might be able to tell I'm very interested in logistics and event planning. 

I'm the kind of geek that wants Grand Designs to show me energy usage stats, insulation values, return on investment...  

A detailed, behind the scenes, docu on Glastonbury and just how the hell they managed to power a mini popup town for a weekend would be fascinating to me. Everything, how the bogs are emptied to the fresh food deliveries to the stalls in the morning. There's so much that must go on that the average punter has no idea about (until it occasionally goes wrong!).

[Quark]

5 minutes ago, cheesey_toastie said:

There's so much that must go on that the average punter has no idea about (until it occasionally goes wrong!).

 

Ah yes, the Smash Riots of 2022 when deliveries were buggered and there was an avo on toast shortage across the site. I still have a limp in damp weather after that.

Edited May 20, 2025 by Quark

[cheesey_toastie]

11 minutes ago, eivomracsy said:

wait what, you don't do that in the uk? how does it work at glasto/in general?

Paper cups at Glastonbury. 

Most other festivals tend to use re-useable but don't have the scale challenges of Glastonbury.  Remember it's huge on a site which is usually (mostly) just farmland - so very little mains water capacity etc etc.

Edited May 20, 2025 by cheesey_toastie

[gooner1990]

22 minutes ago, eivomracsy said:

wait what, you don't do that in the uk? how does it work at glasto/in general?

 

I have a season ticket at Arsenal.

 

You pay £7 for pint of beer in hard plastic cup, they have cup deposit boxes all round the concourse which you put your cup in after you've finished your pint, then they get collected at the end of the game and taken away to be washed/sterilised and reused at the next game.

[gblock]

9 minutes ago, cheesey_toastie said:

Paper cups at Glastonbury. 

Most other festivals tend to use re-useable but don't have the scale challenges of Glastonbury.  Remember it's huge on a site which is usually (mostly) just farmland - so very little mains water capacity etc etc.

Maybe I’m wrong but don’t most of the large UK festivals and day events (25k+) use the exact same paper cups as Glasto?
Some offer small deposits for these paper cups, ie the 10p at Download or R&L, but they still get binned after use.

[cheesey_toastie]

10 minutes ago, gblock said:

Maybe I’m wrong but don’t most of the large UK festivals and day events (25k+) use the exact same paper cups as Glasto?
Some offer small deposits for these paper cups, ie the 10p at Download or R&L, but they still get binned after use.

Not been to Reading or Leeds for years, but most of the smaller ones I've been to have been plastic. 

R&L don't have the same volunteer effort so I bet the 10p thing is cheaper / effective than getting more staff to clean up the cups.

Not an expert though - just my personal experience. 

[Crazyfool01]

Quick reminder , please take all your sh*t home 

[Magic Toaster]

20 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

Quick reminder , please take all your sh*t home 

 

I'm already dreading the mental kick in the head I experience when walking off-site on Monday morning, passing dozens of totally abandoned tents filled with used camping gear.

[Crazyfool01]

1 minute ago, Magic Toaster said:

 

I'm already dreading the mental kick in the head I experience when walking off-site on Monday morning, passing dozens of totally abandoned tents filled with used camping gear.

Yeah indeed although it becomes fairly obvious as the weekend goes on where some of the abandoned tents will be , rubbish not bagged usually equals abandoned tents at the end . Campsite crew do a great job handing out bags , although one of my essential packing items is a roll of bin bags . 

[09matthewsw]

2023 and 2024 #NoTrace

[Padgey]

I haven't seen any post from the festival showing the success of Love the Farm, Leave No Trace this year with the amount of tents that have been packed up and taken home.  How was the site looking late Monday?  I have seen videos that quite a lot of tents have been left behind this year.

[Magic Toaster]

23 minutes ago, Padgey said:

I haven't seen any post from the festival showing the success of Love the Farm, Leave No Trace this year with the amount of tents that have been packed up and taken home.  How was the site looking late Monday?  I have seen videos that quite a lot of tents have been left behind this year.

 

Monday morning at 6am we walked past quite a lot of obviously abandoned tents, chairs, and those wretched camp shower enclosures... Seemingly more so than I remember last year.

 

One such set of tents was from the group who were camping behind us, and they seemed like such nice people too.

 

It made me sad.

Edited July 1, 2025 by Magic Toaster

[broken monkey]

Working with the post festival clean up crew. Just finished Pennards and now working through Paines. Lots of gear left behind, including (oddly) packed up tents with names/phone numbers on. Speaking to a waste collector, seems there’s more left behind this year. 
 

That said, it’s such a satisfying job seeing a field being transformed in a matter of minutes. 

[rock_on]

I guess the amount of first-timers this year means a higher likelihood of stuff being left behind as the message to leave no trace doesn't seem to have been hammered as much as in previous years on the festival's social media. Seasoned festival goers know the score, maybe the festival need to hammer leave no trace more next year.

 

Christ knows what the deal is with leaving packed tents with a name and phone number on them though - that just seems bizarre.