How Bad For The Environment Is Our Summer Festival Habit?

When you’re nipple deep in peak festival madness: flailing around at the front of a 50,000 strong crowd, a bit pissed, a bit disorientated and gloriously lost to the concerns of the real world, the state of the environment is probably the last thing on your mind. Bu that might be about to change.

Ahead of the government’s welcomed proposition to ban plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds in England to try and minimise the huge amount of entirely unnecessary plastic waste that’s killing wildlife and polluting our oceans, British festivals have too made a commitment to making dramatic adjustments to the unnecessary waste amassed at their events.

WACTH: Here’s How Maya Jama Packs For A Festival

From Boardmasters to Shambala, Bestival to Download, more than 60 festivals up and down the country will be halting the use of plastic straws this season as part of the Association of Independent Festivals ‘Drastic on Plastic’ campaign.

The independent festivals and suppliers involved have also committed to a huge three-year plan to eliminate all single-use plastic at events by 2021. So, in the next few years you’ll probably be going about your standard festival antics a little bit differently.

I hold my hands up and admit I’m not very good at maintaining awareness. My priorities are finding a bar with a relatively painless queue, locating a portaloo without a sick speckled toilet seat, and remembering how exactly to get back to my tent. Finding a recycling bin for the plastic pint glass I’d just finished drinking from doesn’t cross my mind as frequently as it should.

But the reality is that festivals are the environmental nightmare than none of us attendees particularly want to face. If you think about how many times you’re served a drink in a disposable plastic cup over the course of a weekend, you’ll only begin to get an impression of just how much single-use plastic is used and then thrown on the ground and forgotten about.

The new plan is re-use instead of single-use, which makes sense for the most part. Deposit schemes to encourage people to return their reusable, more sustainable plastic cups are already in place at loads of events, particularly beer festivals and Christmas markets. But how well will that play out in the middle of a field overtaken by tens of thousands of drunk people?

It’d be a weird shift for consumers to make and hopefully it would quickly become as normal as it currently is to crumple up a plastic pint glass and throw it in the air mid-headline set. That said, there are other complications that come with encouraging the use of more environmentally friendly cups and bottles. Glass is a strict safety no-no on the festival circuit, so that's not really an option; especially if you were hoping to just start bring more of your own drinks to festivals. And, should you lose/drop/forget about the reusable pint glass you'd successfully carried with you for a few hours, are you really going to go searching for it/wash the shit from it/locate it again amongst the madness? You'd hope so, but practically speaking, it probably won't be that simple.

Then there are things like cable ties, the most seemingly practical but unsustainable little trinket relied upon to keep important shit together. Toiletry bottles, baby wipes, plastic bags, and so on. And then there's the huge issue of everyone's favourite festival accessory: glitter. If you're not wearing glitter are you even at a festival? Probably not but you're really not helping the planet if you have decided to cover your body in it for three days.

Glitter is just as harmful to the environment as microbeads are (which have already been banned), so if glitter is struck from the list too, what are the alternatives? Well bio-degradable glitter does exist, you just have to search for it. And obviously you can just not wear it and make some other non-offensive beauty statement instead.

At the crux of these schemes and incentives is making the right choices. It's brilliant that festivals are taking the step to revolutionise the way they operate to encourage significant change. But the onus is on all of us as festival goers and day-to-day consumers to carry the initiative through and think a little less about assumed convenience and more about how our seemingly small actions have a really big impact.

MORE: Your Complete Guide To UK And European Festivals In 2018

Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.