Cleaning up after festivals
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:56AM 
The festival season has begun with the most notable, Glastonbury, already been and gone. A reported 140,000 Glastonbury revellers went home packing after a weekend of extraordinary live entertainment, leaving behind copious amounts of rubbish behind them. Worthy Farm had been transformed from a green paradise to a rubbish tip. So what’s in store for other festivals and worse, the environment?
As a result a coalition of UK festivals has been brought together by 10:10 campaign to reduce each event’s carbon footprint by 10%. Under this festival programme, event organisers will reduce carbon emissions from onsite energy use, water consumption and most importantly waste.
According to 10:10 Global: “Festival-goers leave behind hundreds of tonnes of waste, much of which ends up as landfill. This ranges from small items like cigarette butts and used cups, to costumes and entire tents. On-site waste separation and recycling is crucial to minimising emissions from landfill. Lovebox has committed to having 100% recyclable or biodegradable drink vessels in 2010, and Bestival sends recycled goods to a nearby gasification plant to be turned into electricity. All cups and cutleries sold at Latitude, Reading and Leeds arenas are either recycled or composted. Reading and Leeds work with several charities to prevent tonnes of re-usable goods from going to waste, even broken tent fabric can find a new life as a jacket or a bag!”
Even with the amount of bins around the arenas across UK festivals, if you take a look at previous photographs after the event you’ll see litter everywhere. The rubbish left behind takes a lot of man hours to clean up, but it’s good to know that this rubbish is now being recycled into consumer goods such as packaging for cleaning products.
It isn’t just at festivals where people can make a difference to the environment; you can do it at home too. At Click Cleaning there is a great range of environmentally friendly products to use including biodegradable refuse sacks. The smallest changes can make a big difference; even if you don’t want to change some of your cleaning products, simply recycling your rubbish and swapping a few things with eco-friendly alternatives can help.
