Can a festival ever really be sustainable?

Up until Tuesday night I was set to be going down to Newquay for a beach clean on Friday, followed by a weekend at Boardmasters. I’d read up about the festival, I’d never been, I knew they did a lot of beach cleans over the course of the weekend, this year there were 5 planned, I actually wondered if there would even be enough litter to pick up!

They team up with Surfers Against Sewage to fight against plastic. They charge you to leave the carpark and re-enter, encouraging you to get the shuttle bus from the festival to Fistral beach, which also prevents the town being clogged up by cars. They add a £10 litter bond to your ticket, which you get back when you return a full bag of litter. They banned plastic straws on site, they sold reusable bottles for water, and by 2020 they were planning to ban all non-essential single-use plastic on site.

All these steps are great, and yet it became apparent when they announced the festival was cancelled that there is a still of lot of consumption created by festivals before anyone even arrives.

Social Media was full of angry festival hopefuls demanding all the food, clothes, drinks, camping equipment, (and drugs!) they bought were refunded too. Begging the question, did they really think all that stuff was single use for the weekend only? You don’t need new clothes for a festival, you can buy second hand and you certainly don’t need to support fast fashion just to look your best in a field.

Food is still edible, festival or not. Pot Noodles have a decade long expiry date, so don’t worry guys, they’ll be okay for next year’s festival season!

Camping equipment… Don’t buy a tent that will barely last a night! Those £10 pop up ones? Don’t bother. Get yourself a tent that will keep you dry for the whole weekend. You don’t want to be that person who had to leave the festival early because their tent didn’t fight off the rain and all your stuff was ruined. Camping chairs, air beds, cool boxes, all these things are reusable, stating the obvious.

And as for the drink, obviously it would have been the perfect companion (in moderation!!) to drown your sorrows following the cancellation, let’s not kid ourselves thinking that would last until Christmas.

Now obviously it’s easy for me to criticise the angry kids whose weekend was ruined, because I had an incredibly random turn of events…

You could say that driving 400 miles to do a beach clean and party in a field isn’t exactly “green”, and I’d agree with you. So how about a festival that’s 14 miles of driving instead? Like a knight in shining armour, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, like a portion of chips to an intoxicated youth, Boomtown came to save the weekend!

I grew up on one side of the Boomtown site, and moved to the other several years ago, it’s always been a 15 minute drive away. I used to work for the vets that looked after the cows that lived in the Matterley bowl and I’ve grown up watching that site expand every year as its festival potential grew. Back in February I started following them on the gram to see what they were doing to make their festival greener than ever.

Despite seeing the festival come together every year; seeing the festival goers stock up on supplies in Winnall Tesco while I’ve gone about my regular weekly shop and avoiding visiting the in-laws that one weekend every year when the traffic is going to be terrible, I’ve never actually been to Boomtown...

So when Boardmasters got cancelled because of weather, I started stalking the Boomtown hashtag on Instagram to see how their festival was doing. I saw artist Filthy Luker post a photo of his epic Tent Monster creation and, blown away by how cool it was and how good a message it sent to potential tent-abandoners, I shared the photo in my stories and tagged Boomtown Fair.

To my surprise, they replied and offered me tickets for the weekend! Say whaaat!! Obviously I gleefully accepted! Fast forward through a very, very long moment of foolishness where I neglected to check my junk emails for the tickets and BOOM, Saturday at 7pm we rocked up to site!

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge festival person. I love a dance, I love walking, I love food, I love biodegradable glitter, not washing for days and I love sleeping in my campervan.

So what could be the problem?!

Well, I’m not hugely keen on massive crowds of people and being pushed and shoved, there’s only so much of compost toilets I can deal with (especially when one is on their period, that can be problematic but I’ll come back to that later), I don’t cope well with minimal sleep and I despise the drug scene - being around it makes me uncomfortable, I hate the stench of weed and even cigarette smoke is bad enough for me. Add that all on top of my hatred of seeing cans, balloons, NOS cannisters, plastic cups and other such rubbish strewn everywhere and that’s why enjoying a festival for me becomes a bit of a balancing act. But you know, if you keep your chin up you can’t see the mess that’s on the floor. :P

So seeing as I was given a press pass to the festival, I figured that’s exactly how I’d approach it and I set out to find all the eco warrior propaganda that was being displayed to our keen festival ravers.

Walking through the festival, at first I was in awe by the sheer size of it. Their sets are insanely awesome. From afar they all look like well-constructed stages but when you’re walking around, it’s like a proper town that frankly puts the Diagon Alley at the Harry Potter studios to shame.

I may have litter goggles on permanently so seeing past the rubbish did take a while and I did start picking up bits and bobs but here’s the thing, if I went into full litter picking mode I wouldn’t have seen any of the festival. I had to severely tame the litter picker in me. Raver Rachel had to take her place. But Raver Rachel still cares. So I took my reusable bottle everywhere with me, I carried my reusable cutlery in my bum bag (or fanny pack if you prefer), and I forced my husband to carry around my bamboo Tupperware box because his backpack was bigger than mine.

The first place I used my bamboo box at, took it without question and even filled it up with more chips just because I’d brought a reusable, and frankly that’s an incentive I can really get on board with! So shout out to Iona and her friend at the Fries stall for the extra chips and for also selling cans of water instead of plastic bottles. That same box later held an epic vegan katsu burger and chips. Sadly the next day there was a misunderstanding where I thought my husband had put my box in his backpack and he thought I had. So I did end up using paper plates which was annoying because I had a great record going for not putting anything of my own in the bin.

There were a pretty good amount of vegan options at Boomtown and as stated in their environmental policy they give preference to vegan, vegetarian and healthy options. I tried some fried Plantain which was really tasty, kind of like potatoey banana. I also had a burrito which was delicious and some vegan churros. I always think I can eat more churros than I think I can, but luckily all I needed was half hour of dancing to Salt N Pepa and I got peckish again! They had some purely vegan stands and most stands had some kind of vegan option, I even saw a food vendor called “BACON” that had vegan options!

Boomtowns environmental statement clearly lays out their goals. They want to be a zero waste festival with no single use, which is incredibly bold of a festival to try and achieve. It means every single person going needs to be as committed to the environment as Boomtown organisers are. I struggle to get the 10 colleagues I have in my team to care. How many people go to a festival thinking of the environment? Out of the 65,000 people, how many of those just want to go, get off their face and attempt to get home again?

One of the highlights of the festival for me was seeing a raving litter picker. Just as the description suggests. We were watching Ghetto Funk Allstars by the Dubtendo stage when a dude with a litter picker sashayed over to grab some rubbish and put it in his bag (a reusable bag I might add!). He kept raving around picking up litter until I lost sight of him. And just like that I wished I had my litter pickers on me too! The joy of that moment even kept me going when I saw a guy drop kick his empty wine bag into the crowd. I had hoped my glare would burn into him but he didn’t flinch.

It was at that point I decided I needed a rest, so I headed to a lush piece of grass to lay down and bask in the sun. I was joined by a grass hopper, the first I’ve ever seen that close but he hopped away before I could get my camera out. That led me to ask myself, on such a rural piece of countryside are there any pheasants, foxes or even badgers that don’t move out when Boomtown comes around and sit there for the whole weekend thinking “what the hell is happening?”.

At a festival where they’ve fenced off patches of corn crops, and butterflies flutter past you while you’re queueing for the toilet, you wonder how well the ground can recover for it to be used as anything other than a festival. Do festivals bring in more money than farming cattle on the same land would? Could festivals be the answer for landowners and farmers who might have to deal with the outcome of reduced meat and dairy consumption? Are festivals more sustainable than animal agriculture, for both the farmer and the planet?

After that sit down with my grass hopper friend, I picked up 14 NOS cannisters that were a metre from the bin. Which prompted a passer-by to say “very noble of you” (I might have thrown the final one in the bin with a bit too much agitated gusto) and we then shared our confusion as to why they struggled to get them to the bin if it was so close, or if they just didn’t care. The problem with the NOS cannisters too is that they get trodden into the mud and then they’re buried. Maybe in 200 years when aliens have come to explore a planet once inhabited by humans they’ll recycle them to make more spaceship parts!?

Just as Boardmasters have done, Boomtown add £10 to tickets as an “eco bond”, the idea being that you fill a bag of litter and exchange it for the £10 back. I did see people doing this, which was awesome, and actually when you think about it it’s a genius idea. If there are festival goers who aren’t bothered losing the £10, you’ve gained extra money to pay the clean-up crew, if festival goers do want their £10, you’ve got some more of the litter cleaned up quicker, nobody really loses.

You couldn’t walk anywhere around Boomtown without seeing the ‘Leave No Trace’ posters. It was even on the wristbands.

They introduced a competition for a free ticket next year if you posted a selfie of you with your tent on your way home on social media. An extra incentive and a great way to make people aware that a tent isn’t single use. You’d think it would be common sense but we’ve all seen the festival aftermath photos from previous years.

A lot of food vendors were giving out compostable cups, we’ve all seen them, the “it’s not plastic it’s plants” cups that are compostable but rarely composted. On the food strips they had specific bins for compostable cutlery, plates, cups and food waste. Which was refreshing to see. I’m not sure how much of the right stuff was put in there but it’s better than festivals and fairs I’ve seen where they’ve offered the cups but they’ve been binned with everything else, meaning they haven’t actually been composted at all. Compostable cups can be a debate for greenwashing, I still think they’re better than plastic but neither is obviously even better.

From compost cups to compost toilets. Compost toilets aren’t new but they’re the go-to toilets for festivals now. The idea is (as explained on the door of the toilet – or as much as I can remember from it) you create layers of poop, tissue, and sawdust which is cultivated by the urine to create the perfect conditions for humanure. You can generally smell the toilets before you see them, I’ve read the sawdust helps the smell so I’d dread to think what it would be like without it! There was a lot of light reading in the toilets, but you don’t want to stick around reading to be honest. A couple of toilets I went in had vegan messages on and also the Mooncup stickers!

I was unfortunate enough to be on my period over the festival. For anyone who doesn’t want to read about periods just skim past this bit. I had intended to go to the festival later so that I didn’t need to navigate removing, emptying, cleaning and reinserting my Mooncup in a compost toilet. I had the fear I’d drop my cup on poo mountain and honestly the thought of the bacteria put me off even wanting to attempt anything. So I just prayed my period wasn’t heavy for 24 hours. The best thing about a Mooncup is that you can leave them in a lot longer than tampons if you don’t have a heavy flow, whereas tampons leave you at risk of toxic shock syndrome. I got very lucky but by 11pm on Sunday I really did feel like I was pushing it so called quits and went home (I was also very tired with work the next day).

On the last toilet visit I spotted a tampon applicator in the compost toilet. Obviously tampon applicators aren’t compostable and I have no idea if other menstrual products are. I imagine that applicator (and however many others there were in the toilets), thrown in by desperate people cursing their bodies for the poorly timed gift, will live as part of the humanure compost forever.

It would be nice if there was the occasional ‘period’ toilet that was like a spa when you walked in with the correct bins and proper soap and hot water. But until then I guess we just struggle on while PWP’s (people with peens) get away with whipping it out wherever there’s a fence or a hedgerow to lean against, or in one guys case, right next to his van, which I saw from the window of my van. Maybe that’s all part of the festival experience, I’m not bitter or anything.

Boomtown made a great effort to showcase their passion for sustainability. From the Boomtown wire baskets to fill with cans, to the second hand t-shirt printing, to the tent monster (that was sadly taken down because of the wind by the time I got there), to encouraging litter picking for cash and continuously posting on social media about their environmental promises to engage festival goers.

It will be interesting to see just how much rubbish there is left when everyone has gone home, which they will be doing as I write this. Critical Waste, who cleaned up during and after Glastonbury are there, so I have no doubts it will get done well, but I sure hope their job is made easier because of the energy Boomtown organisers have put into their ‘Leave No Trace’ messaging.

Or is it the case, as Boardmasters will have shown this year, that the cleanest festival is no festival at all?

If this year has improved then I’m excited to see how they can make it even better next year and really strive for that zero waste dream. And maybe they need a series of litter picking timeslots across the weekend to help make it easier for people get their litter bond back…anybody know someone who could help with that??