The mess after the festival

In excess of 60 000 people came to the festival site which I visited the other , and as I approached it across the fields , a quite unnatural smell was detected some way off - that of dirty hospitals , a kind of post janitorial smell where the janitor was worn out by continual dirty morass and mixed up a bad batch of chem , too weak , and the drying off smell of cleaning was of badly cleaned hospital.

On reaching the site the set down operation was well under way , they'd done a thorough litter pick quite obviously , and staging was in various states of removal . Moving through the site , which was still completely outlined by an enormous wall of high metal sheet fencing and scaffold sentry posts
there were many many ibc water containers stacked and some toilet blocks still remaining .

The cause of this rant which is not much of a rant , was the sight of at least 2 camping areas , where the clientele had pitched . No joke , it was chaos , with mainly unclaimed tents just strewn everywhere , and to my surprise , seagulls wheeling overhead of them . Someone had even made made a long heap of the debris , but the whole field was still covered in jumbled mess .

So here's the ranty bit , wtf is the matter with people nowadays ? Have they had such a crappy education as to throw away reusable assets like tents?
Like , mini houses their mummies bought for them , and they just forget how to take it back in their drug and music fuelled stupor at the end of only three days of living ? It's not just a crappy education its a general bad attitude , a selfish lazy thoughtless and uncaring approach to life , to just leave all that behind . I mean its not like it didnt cost money . Its all gravy for the seagulls among us , that's a given , (or is it a plastic throatwedge?)
we can clean up your lazy bones , but then again its a downright embarrassment to the human race , what the western world has become , what we're allowing our youth to turn into .

People hand their kids into education by force and what it turns out is tired and unco-operative semi family members out for themselves , taking what they want , looking down on their elders of all things , guzzling internet and drugs , thinking they know sh1t when they are manually bereft and mentally unhooked from reality , its a disaster . They cant even roll up a tent and take it away !

a reply to: ZIPMATT

It's all so sad and pathetic.

a reply to: ZIPMATT
Cheap throwaway consumables.
I've dumped £30 tents at muddy Glastonbury festivals in the past, 30 quid meh.
I will say though, at Glastonbury they have charity partners who collect the tents and other usefull items for the homeless. A local group in my area got over 100 tents out of it this year along with sleeping bags and other items.
It is how cheap things are these days though, if I haven't done my clothes washing and can't be bothered to do it I'll often just buy new socks, underpants, and tee shirts in town.
Throwaway society for sure, and I'm as guilty as an early 40's adult.

Humans are messy and wasteful?

Well this must be a new phenomenon...

a reply to: ZIPMATT

I used to work security at festivals and they were all left looking like refugee camps. Glastonbury was the worst of them with acres of abandoned tents, garbage and half-assed fire pits. Save the Whale and monthly subs to Greenpeace go out the window when a hundred thousand hangovers and come-downs need to beat the traffic.

"I want to save the dolphins, but we've got a six hour drive and we need to get moving people!"

a reply to: ZIPMATT

The same people that left this wasteland will be the first to lecture ME on how humans are killing the planet.

F# hypocrites.

a reply to: stosh64

Woodstock where it all started...

a reply to: ZIPMATT

I used to hunt birds in a farmer's field in the midwest USA when I was young. I always asked permission, and the only thing the farmer asked is that I pick up my spent shotgun shells. He said they messed up his plowing equipment if left on the ground. If I got a few birds I would always drop one or two off at his house after I was done. And I always picked up my shells. Dad reloaded them, so they were kinda valuable.

One fall I knocked on his door to ask if I could hunt, and he said no. His discs on his plow got messed up by some old shells on the ground, and he looked at me like I left them there.

I guess pigs who don't follow some simple rules can ruin a good time for everyone.

nvm

a reply to: stosh64

@Stosh that is ridiculous !

UK festivals and live music have seen a rise in attendance ( PA ) UK gig and festival attendance reached 30.9 million people in 2016, it has been revealed. A new study by UK Music found that there was a 12 per cent increase in live music audiences last year, which contributed £4 billion to the UK economy.11 Jul 2017

So about several million perfectly good tents must get skipped every year . Ive watched that 3 times its shocking . At least there are some sensible scavengers . I think I'd go home worth my weight in tentpegs

a reply to: Kandinsky

Lets not just blame the lefty music people!

Seven people were arrested and 37 were taken to a hospital during Saturday night's Kenny Chesney concert at Heinz Field, authorities said.

...

When the concert was over, Pittsburgh city crews worked until sunrise Sunday to clear an estimated 48 tons of garbage from the stadium's parking lots and along the North Shore.

This year's concert went over more smoothly than past ones, officials said.

triblive.com...

I live near pittsburgh. They actually changed the rules for tailgating sports games because the Kenny chesney crowd every year was tailgating for so many hours and leaving so much trash.

Everything from couches to tents left behind.

a reply to: Grambler

I had to google Chesney to see who he was.

People don't give two Fs about their garbage after a few days of hard partying. It looks worse for 'the Left' because they're the ones waving the flags for saving the planet. 'The Right' aren't wearing Amnesty badges or packing vegan burgers for the BBQs. One group earns the hypocrisy tag.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: Grambler

I had to google Chesney to see who he was.

People don't give two Fs about their garbage after a few days of hard partying. It looks worse for 'the Left' because they're the ones waving the flags for saving the planet. 'The Right' aren't wearing Amnesty badges or packing vegan burgers for the BBQs. One group earns the hypocrisy tag.

Agree with the hypocrisy.

But the Chesney fans have personally affected my Pittsburgh Pirate tailgating! I mean come on, I already have to suffer being a fan of one of the cheapest teams in professional sports!

But now thanks to Kenny chesney fans, I can only grill out and drink for like 4 hours before the game!

(And for the record, I was raised to make sure I clean up when at events like that, so all my friends and I clean up very well after our tailgating.)

a reply to: ZIPMATT

I can give you another example of hypocrisy klike this.

I was in intercollegiate policy debate. Needless to say, it was almost universally composed of left leaning people.

In fact, extreme environmentalism, feminism, etc., were quite normal.

I, being a dirty libertarian, was considered extremely right wing.

Anyways, you would constantly hear about helping poor workers and saving the environment.

And yet the same people who were so passionate about that would leave garbage in every room all over whatever hotel or campus we were in. I mean it was horrible, these are young adults and they were messier than elementary school children.

I often found myself staying after the tournament to clean up garbage with custodians or student volunteers.

I always made me think that words are cheap, its actions that matter more.

a reply to: ZIPMATT

Let's say a million tents get dumped annually across ALL UK festivals? Going off Stosh's video a lot of them are cheap pop-ups with the rest being about £100 two-man tents and some of the larger ones being up to around £800 and probably more. Most two man tents weigh about 2.5kg and even the pop-ups are a kg. The big ones can go up over 20kg.

1 million £100 2.5kg tents are a £100 million and would weigh 2.5 million kilos with much of it being non-recyclable.

n 2014, festival organisers managed to recycle half of the waste left behind, including recycling 114 tonnes of composted organic waste, 400 tonnes of chipped wood, 23 tonnes of glass, 85 tonnes of cans and plastic bottles, 41 tonnes of cardboard, 162 tonnes of scrap metal, 11.2 tonnes of clothing, tents, sleeping bags, 0.264 tonnes of batteries, 3 tonnes of dense plastic.

www.thesun.co.uk...

That's always confused me as well. We only bring in what we can handle, and by golly if we bring it in we sure as hell can bring it all back OUT. The fact that festivals have to have such large volunteer groups for clean up in the first place is sad.

-Alee

@Kandinsky

2.5 million kilos of tents would weigh 2500 metric tonnes , so somewhere those numbers and claims of recycling from the sun are not adding up the truth perhaps , especially where abandonment of the articles is largely standard practise . These kids would rather fill their heads with substances and pay again later than remember they have to also oversee their own kit , and that does not bode well for the future . On the face of it , everything they learn at school is now entirely disconnected from any kind of practicality at all , bar home economics , if they even bother with that anymore most of them dont anyway

a reply to: ZIPMATT

Let me tell you something ZIPMATT...

I have been going to festivals since the early noughties, and I have never, once, not in my whole life, left a tent or any piece of camping gear, at a festival. Even when my Outbound brand, two man dome tent, that I had camped in since I was twelve on camping trips with my parents, died at a festival (massive gash about two foot long down one side, from someone elses errant tent pole), I broke camp, packed it away, and took it home.

I generate trash, just like anyone else, but I bag it and put it at least next to, if not inside the site provided bins at festivals. Heck, I even dispose of my cigarette ends carefully, placing them in a pocket until I come across an appropriate bin or disposal area. Now, as for leaving gear at festivals, there are two reasons I do not do it. First of all, and most important, its a dick move, and therefore utterly beneath me to do such a thing. But further to that, you have to consider the implications.

First of all, selfishly speaking, I cannot afford to discard my gear. I have worked hard for my not very much, and what I have, I am keeping wherever possible, thank you very much. Despite my small means, I do not skimp on things like the shelter in which I will be sleeping. I have one of those fancy, rapid pitching tents, double skinned, fully weather proofed, and it was about... I want to say sixty quid, down from seventy when I bought it, some time ago. That was an investment, and I want that tent to last me a good long while more than it has before I purchase another. Same goes for my roll mat. My sleeping bag was a gift from a mates dad, and its pretty special. Its one of those that has legs and arms, rather than just being a literal bag for sleeping in. Its super toasty in the cold, and you can open up vents and stuff in it for when its hot at night. It probably cost quite a bit, because its rated down to a very low temperature, and I think it comes from Norway, or at least somewhere with very cold weather potential, so its quality gear.

Another reason to manage your trash correctly, AND take everything you showed up with, that is not actual trash, is that no one likes to pay over the odds for a festival ticket, and every time some lackwit costs the organisers money in clean up time, it gets added to the cost of the next years ticket. Now, the festival I go to has been really very good about that, still putting on a damned fine weekend of music and metal thrashing madness, for a very reasonable amount of money. But it has crept up over the years, and some of that increase has been to do with the tendency for people to leave crap behind. I want to still be going to this festival a decade from now, two decades, for as long as I can get away with it basically. I do not want to be priced out at some stage, simply because people have become so lazy that they cannot be bothered to remove the evidence of their presence.

I don't care whether the tent is damaged, or the airbed has a hole in it. Nor do I care how high a person is when they are breaking camp, there is no excuse for leaving things behind, that are YOUR responsibility to take care of. If something is wrecked, take it home and dispose of it there. Or, alternatively, if your tent is REALLY broken, use the flysheet to wrap up your other trash, tie it at the corners, and place the entire thing in or next to the large industrial bins that are present in most every campsite at a festival, at least make the effort. Don't just walk off, and leave your crap for someone else to deal with, at the expense of those whose event you just attended, and indeed the cost of next years attendees.

a reply to: ZIPMATT

somewhere those numbers and claims of recycling from the sun are not adding up

That's my fault, sorry. The link was specifically about a single Glastonbury festival and my guesstimates were based on the total amount of festivals in the UK each year (it's about 400).

Let's not get too down on the festival going party-people of today. Their equivalents left a ton of mess at Woodstock too and that was a startling 50 years ago! Jeez, fifty years. That 60s education was pretty good imo and produced the first generations of women in the workplace. The men seemed to have a good practical background too. It's more like Bacchanalia and hedonism at good festivals rather than the slippery slope of society.

They should definitely show more respect for their hosts and their environment and make more effort to clean their crap up.

I tend to agree that recent generations seem less practical, but not so sure it links in to hedonistic under-30s being litter-louts. There's good reason to believe they've always been that way despite there always being a good proportion who minimise the impacts of their own garbage.

I don't care how "cheap" you think the tent is. It's a tent! You paid good money for it. Why on earth would you leave it?!

I don't understand that kind and degree of throwaway mentality at all.