Leeds festival: The environmental hangover

“Shall we go to Leeds Festival and help salvage tents for refugees in France?” my wife asked after seeing a post from Care4Calais requesting volunteers.

As a family, we have plenty of experience with tents, so we registered to help at the end of the festival on Bank Holiday Monday. It was an easy decision, not just because of our camping skills, but because it was a tangible way to help fellow humans in dire straits. We are acutely aware that, one day, it could be us who need assistance.

The day was soon upon us. We arrived in good time and mustered in a holding area to be briefed alongside a small army of around one hundred other volunteers. As we pulled into the campsite, my wildest imagination hadn't come close to envisaging the apocalyptic scene that awaited us.

We saw sights we’d never seen before. As we slowly cruised around, I realised I’d been very ignorant of this slice of life — a whole subculture and industry that I knew about but hadn’t given much thought to.

A surreal scene

Like many, I’d been captivated by the glitz of grand stages, distracting from the realities of the aftermath. A planetary metaphor if ever there was one. The sheer scale of the festival site was incredible but then came the fields of abandoned tents, thousands upon thousands of them billowing in a sea of litter.

We parked up and stood amid the surreal scene, trying to digest what had happened. Red kites circled overhead looking for scraps, conjuring images of bloodied battlefields of old. A Ukrainian woman stood aghast, her hands on her hips as she surveyed the scene: “This is just so wrong.”

Dark, haunted faces picked through the wasteland alongside us, people who, it transpired, had skin in the game having made the perilous journey across the Channel in small boats. More than most, they understood the importance of the task ahead.

Everything seemed brand new: tents, inflatable mattresses, sleeping mats, sleeping bags, camping chairs, LED lamps…all used once and abandoned. There was no time to stand and gawp. We had to get on and gather as much gear as possible in the hours before nightfall.

So much energy consumed in a single-use tent

As we got into our stride, we started to detect patterns. The tents were mainly a few brands — mostly made in China — and a huge number of Tesco tents. Let’s think about that for a moment.

We often default to worrying about emissions —  as Bill Rees recently pointed out “carbon dioxide is the single biggest waste product by weight of industrial economies” — but what about the energy consumed in the short period of usefulness? How many pairs of hands have been involved in the existence of those tents?

Let’s think about what it took to extract the oil to make the fabric, about the people and machines to cut and sew it, the folk who neatly tied the guy-lines before packing the tents into their snug little bags. And then into shipping containers, loaded onto lorries and trains to ports where giant ships power thousands of miles to the UK, offload in Southampton or Felixstowe and distribute to stores where they’re stacked high and cheap.

Imagine the soon-to-be festival goers in the supermarket, seeing the neat little tents on the shelves, sold so cheaply, nurturing the pervasive culture of disposability. Rumour has it that discarded tents will go to charity, an attractive option, both financially and in terms of sly, industrial-scale cleansing of consciences. Sling those tents in the trolley and off to Leeds we go…

'Thousands and thousands of tents billowing in a sea of litter.' Photo: Jack Lowe

Some festivals are green

Now fast forward to the end of the festival. Home time. After three days of boozing, who’s going to wrestle that cheap, flimsy tent back into its dinky little bag and carry it home? It’s going to charity, right? In all likelihood, no. Eh? Haven’t I just said we were a small army to clean up this whole damn mess? Yes, indeed. But, as we drove away, it was clear we’d barely touched the sides that day.

It’s hard to convey the sheer scale of what we witnessed but, suffice it to say, the total number of tents salvaged amounted to less than 1% of those left behind. Sickening, especially as this happens yearly at festivals like Leeds and Reading.

Yet other festival sites like Shambala and Greenbelt are left in immaculate condition, so what do they do differently? I compared websites and it’s clear the target audiences and mindsets are very different. Shambala and Greenbelt have a very green, sentient approach — festival goers know from the outset what’s expected of them.

By contrast, on the Leeds Festival website the first thing you see are loyalty schemes and corporate sponsors — the epitome of an industrial consumer society and a bargain basement mentality, neatly marrying up with all those tents stacked high in the local supermarkets.

Who’s to blame?

We don’t entirely blame the people who attended Leeds Festival and left such a mess. Sure, there’s a responsibility to tidy up and they were capable of tidying up. Nearly all personal effects were packed up and taken away. It was ‘just' the tents and paraphernalia that were left behind along with the rubbish and endless cheap, crappy, prepackaged food.

Fires have been banned because in previous years people were setting tents alight. So food can no longer be cooked. And yes, the organisers could have installed many more bins and recycling points, but their sustainability pledges are laughable in the face of the scenes we witnessed.

However, the problem is bigger. The whole system needs an overhaul and festival organisers have a huge part to play in that. Rather than profits over planet, festival organisers could decide that they’re going to instil a Shambala-esque culture instead.

And what about financial penalties? Should the cost of the clean up be included in the price of the ticket? It already is. After we salvagers left, the bulldozers rolled in to scrape up the rest and dump it into landfill. The financial cost of the clean up may have been met – but the environmental cost hasn’t – the waste and devastation shouldn’t happen in the first place.

Urgent cultural shift

We need an urgent mass cultural shift if we’re to have any chance of surviving what’s heading our way, and to understand that pointing the finger of blame ultimately does not help us in predicaments like these. The productive and positive route would be to let the past go and to work out how to do things better together from now on.

We need community thinking, not profit over planet. For those who entertain a notion of a future, it’s not too late to make our corner of the world the best it can be. Instead of salvaging brand new tents at a music festival, can we salvage some sound community ethics instead?

In the words of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax from 1971: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Jack Lowe is an active citizen and documentarist.

 www.jacklowe.com/ | www.lifeboatstationproject.com
@MrJackLowe