Glastonbury is one of the biggest festivals in the UK, with over 135,000 attendees each year.
The festival, located at Worthy Farm in Somerset, attracts visitors from all over the world, and the Pyramid stage sees performances from some of the world biggest pop icons.
But with such a densely-populated festival comes a significant amount of litter. Whilst there are over 1,300 volunteers to help with the recycling and post festival clearance, it takes them a good few weeks to completely clear the land after the festival is over.
This is due to the sizable levels of waste that get left behind once the five-day festival finishes. The waste includes an estimated, 5,000 tents, 6,500 sleeping bags, 400 gazebos and 54 tonnes of cans and plastic bottles, all of which equates to roughly 1,650 tonnes of rubbish.
Although the festival commits to reminding festival-goers of their ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ policy, it still costs up to £780,000 to dispose of the rubbish festival-goers leave behind, which they continue to point out is money that could be donated to a worthy charity.
And despite making everybody who bought a ticket sign up to the “Love the farm, leave no trace” pledge back in 2016, the festival still took over three weeks to completely clear of rubbish.
However, on a more positive note, in 2015 the festival managed to recycle over 60% of the waste festival-goers left behind, and they are still trying every year to reuse more and more rubbish. This includes recycling all cans, glass, paper, electronic equipment, wood and organic waste.
Although Glastonbury does a lot to help completely clear Worthy Farm, the problem of festival-goers who fail to pick up all their rubbish when leaving the campsite still remains.
But seeing how determined Glastonbury is to increase how much waste it recycles is a great example of how large scale events can help the environment by making it their mission to recycle as much rubbish as possible.
If you have a large-scale event, commercial, residential or building site that needs clearing,
then contact Junk Hunters to see if we can cover your area.