Vol.01 - Past Tents
Association of Independent Festivals
AIF is a national not for profit trade association and the UK’s leading festival representative body.
Hey there. Welcome to Forecast, an occasional bulletin from the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), where we share news and think-pieces that will open your mind to new possibilities on all things music festivals.
We want to talk about tents.
Here’s the good news, and it might surprise you.
Most people who attend independent festivals do not leave their tents behind.
“We've never had a single tent left behind at Fire in the Mountain!” says Joe Buirski, organiser of Fire in the Mountain, a folk festival in Wales with an audience of 1500 people.
The same is true at Green Gathering, an event that puts the environment at its heart, “it just doesn't happen at our festival,” says Emma Weirdigan, Festival Organiser.
The most that gets lost at Between the Trees, a small festival with an audience of 2000, is half a box of lost property. “We have no waste at all”, says Andrew Thomas, Festival Organiser.
Shambala Festival, an event with an audience of 20,000, is another exemplar. Every single one of the tents bought on-site is taken home by the festival goers.
That’s all quite remarkable, isn’t it? And it might not be how you thought things were.
The majority of people, if asked to imagine a post-festival field, would likely describe something littered with abandoned tents, broken chairs, empty beer cans, and plastic bottles. This does happen — there are events where there’s been little or no progress. This year the most publicised perpetrator was Creamfields. We hope they’re reading this bulletin for inspiration of what’s possible because change is possible if you want it.
Where tent waste is an issue, many independent festivals are at the forefront of testing out innovative and creative methods to solve it.
In 2019, AIF launched our ‘Take Your Tent Home’ campaign to help counter the issue of single-use tent mentality which produces an incredible amount of waste with a significant environmental impact.
At the time, we estimated that 250,000 tents were being left at music festivals across the UK with most unable to be collected by charities or recycled, meaning the vast majority of this number ended up in landfill.
Even at the larger end of the audience-size spectrum, independent festival organisers lead the way with positive behaviour change campaigns to make leaving your tent unacceptable behaviour.
Boomtown Fair, one of the largest independent festivals in the UK, has a young demographic, with many people often attending a festival for the first time. The organisers are continually focusing on reducing their tent waste issue and use a range of creative methods. For the last couple of years, they’ve been monitoring site waste using drones and have seen major positive changes: from 83% of tents being taken home in 2023 to 86% in 2024.
“We have been looking at lots of different ways to encourage and instill better behaviour,” says Lauren Blackburne-Tinker, Boomtown’s Deputy Event Operations, and Sustainability Manager.
These initiatives range from educational poster campaigns encouraging care for the local area, the South Downs National Park, to inspiring and engaging eco-volunteers like Eco-Warriorz, who lead campsite clean-ups with competitions and sound systems. There's also the ‘nearly free shop,’ which offers salvaged camping gear for a £20 deposit, with £18 refunded when items are returned at the end of the event.
“Now we have two years' worth of good consecutive data, we will now use this to see whether certain campsite areas are hot spots for waste or whether particular tent types are causing us a particular issue.”
Bloodstock, a heavy metal festival, combines its charitable partnership with an incentivised ticket competition. People who take a photo of themselves at the tent donation point tagging the festival get put into a competition to win one of five pairs of tickets to the next event.
Like many of the independent festivals, Boomtown and Bloodstock both offer pre-pitched campsites, provided by companies like Vintents and Camplight, who help salvage and reuse old tents.
These are just a handful of stories from a fraction of independent festivals that are pushing for more responsible mentalities when it comes to taking your tent home.
SPOTLIGHT ON: KENDAL CALLING
As a result of too much rubbish and too many tents being left on site after the show, Kendal Calling organisers decided it was time to take action. The ‘Leave Nothing But Memories’ campaign was launched in 2022 and the results are worth shouting about.
The organisers banned single-use plastic, brought in reusable cups, and increased the number of bins across site. The idea being that if people saw that the arena was clean that would encourage more positive action in the campsites.
“I resisted this being some overarching sustainability campaign, it needed to be specific about tents. We wanted to emphasise that leaving your tent behind is not just one of those things people do at festivals." Andy Smith, Andy Smith, Founder of Kendal Calling, told us. "At Kendal Calling, tents were left by a minority of people, and knowing that humans are social creatures who rarely like to go against the grain, a large part of the campaign was pointing out that it's a dirty habit that only a minority of losers do.”
The team reinforced the message all over the event so that it was impossible to miss. It was everywhere:
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The results speak for themselves. In 2023, 98% of tents at Kendal Calling were taken home.
This is obviously not only a great result for the planet, but it’s also good for the production budgets.
“It’s also worth noting that festivals are under pressure to clear their campsites quickly. The longer it takes the more expensive it becomes, especially when it’s windy and tents/litter are given time to blow into all corners of your site. The best thing for festivals would be for everyone to take their tents home with them!” says Kevin Moore, Operations Director, Kendal Calling.
What happens at independent festivals when people do leave some tents?
For small events with manageable amounts of abandoned tents to deal with, many set up agreements with local charities to donate what’s left on site.
“Any tents that are left behind we donate to the Scouts.”, says Harriet McBain, Festival Organiser of family-focused festival, Deer Shed, “We also provide a financial donation in return for them litter picking for us post-festival.”
End of the Road has a similar picture. “Our demographic, families, are pretty respectful of the site. They generally tidy up after themselves and we have very few tents left onsite,” says Festival Organiser, Benny Locke. “Generally we get maybe 1 or 2 tents left at the Info Point, which we then pass onto charity partners, normally Refugee Community Kitchen who also collect leftover food from caterers”
We Out Here created a new partnership for 2024 with a local homeless charity ‘Hope for Food’. The organisers allow the charity to come in on the Monday, post-festival, to collect any items they can utilise.
These types of charitable collaborations are taking place between hundreds of festivals each year across the country.
However, we should be cautious that if festival go-ers think that their tent will be giving to a good cause, there is the risk that this could be grounds for a well-meaning bleary-eyed post-partied punter to leave it behind.
We all agree that the best thing we want people to do is take their tent home with them.
Some final points:
We can’t talk about tent waste without talking about retailers driving the demand for cheap equipment marked at festival go-ers which encourages a single-use mindset. In 2019, we published research by Comp-A-Tent, an organisation investigating festival waste and solutions, which suggested that as many as 36% of tents left at festivals are bought from either Argos or Tesco. We need retailers to step up and play a part in changing consumer behaviour.
Although special mention to Decathlon who started their ‘No Tent Left Behind’ campaign in 2024 whereby festival goers could return their tent for a gift card of the same value. A positive action from a retailer.
The Last Word:
Hannah Cox, Director of Betternotstop a sustainable impact agency that helps businesses implement sustainable strategies puts the overarching picture concisely:
Any festival that can afford to spend upwards of millions of pounds on a Headline Act, should be ashamed if they aren’t investing at least a tenth of that in sustainability practices. For many independent festivals with engaged audiences who believe in the mission and values of that event, tent waste is not a problem. It tends to be festivals that have allowed bad practice for years that struggle to create a change, and in those cases I believe they need to have the confidence to say to the audience. This is not ok, this is what we are doing to change things, and we want you to be part of it. And if you can’t, then there will be consequences... To be honest I think councils should revoke licenses of festivals that don’t prove they are actively investing in this. They should be showing their P&L to councils and have clear sustainability goals, there should be a minimum % invested in sustainable practices. - Hannnah Cox, Director Betternotstop
Find out how the festival industry is shaping up on sustainability and get more advice on making your event more sustainable in the ‘2024 More than Music Report’
And please, next time you’re asked to imagine a post-festival field, maybe try to expand your mind to include some of the fantastic independent champions and their audiences, who are cleaning up after themselves, and taking their tent home, or putting it into a donation waste pen.
We'll be back soon with more festival forecasts.
John, Phoebe & the AIF Team.
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Account Executive @ Sunbaba | Event branding specialists 🎪
2moReally insightful - It's so interesting that the smaller, greener festivals seem to have people attending who care for their belongings and the space they are attending. It's something the larger festivals could take insight from.