green festivals recognised for their efforts

The first recipients have been announced for a new award that has been introduced to acknowledge the commitment by individual festivals to environmentally friendly practices.

The team behind AGreenerFestival.com are responsible for the award, which was unveiled earlier this year and in keeping with the website's ethos aims to promote greener practices and sustainability for the festival circuit.

So far six festivals have been short-listed for the award, all of which have signed up to Greener Festival's A-Z of twenty six green pledges, and passed the tests that the AGF team made when they visited the festivals on site.

The festivals are (in no particular order):

Summer Sundae Weekender
Sunrise Celebration
Laitude
Big Green Gathering
Glastonbury
Edinburgh Film Festival
The Glade
Big Session Festival

In addition to this award, AgreenerFestival.com have given Download Festival the ‘Most Improved’ Award, recognising the efforts of the Festival - a particularly ‘un-green’ event in 2006 - towards a far more sustainable site in 2007 with a pro-active management team, encouraging a car sharing system, the use of recyclable cups, and vowing to spend £250,000 (the same amount it cost to clean up the site last year) to ensure that this year produces less waste and is cleaner than ever before.

Bonnaroo Festival in the USA and Peats Ridge Festival in Australia will both reveive international awards for their efforts. Bonnaroo has site-wide recycling, a solar powered stage, encourages the widespread use of bio-diesel and insists on biodegradable catering products; while Peats Ridge has managed to reduce on-site waste to almost nothing with recycling, composting toilets, all festival power from sustainable sources, all printing on sugar cane byproduct paper with friendly inks and reclaimed materials used for site decoration.

A Greener Festival's co-founder Claire O'Neill said "abandoned tents were a major problem in 2007. This year's rain and mud at many festivals coupled with tents selling for under £10 meant that many festival goers left behind their accommodation - with even the most organised festivals struggling to deal with thousands and thousands of tents. A number of festivals trialed bio-diesel this year but there are continuing concerns about unsustainable palm oil plantations. Other issues are pollution and the carbon footprint from private cars at festivals - we are keen to push public transport and car sharing, and hope to see more local produce/suppliers being used by events in 2008, not only to reduce milage but to help benefit local economies."

This festival award actually has some meaning. Unlike other festival awards, its based on a fair comparison by people who have actually attended the festivals being voted for or against, and isn't based on marketing through emails begging for votes, a perhaps self interested short-list of festivals to vote for, or people voting for or against festivals they haven't attended - through all these things other awards are completely meaningless.