Re-use or recycle your festival tent?
Camping at a festival is possibly one of the best experiences you can have! That is, assuming you can actually find your tent in the wee small hours when you’re all partied out! But would you re-use or recycle your festival tent? Or would you just leave it in the field?
We’ve all seen the images of fields full of abandoned tents after the likes of Glasto, but what happens to them? Does someone come and collect them and give them to the needy? Is someone paid to come and clear up after you? Does it all end up in landfill? According to SomersetLive, It costs organisers £780,000 to dispose of all the rubbish after the festival. That’s a lot of money that won’t go to Water Aid, Greenpeace or Oxfam!
Festival organisers estimated that 11 tonnes of clothes and camping gear were abandoned in 2015! 11 TONNES!! That includes 6,500 sleeping bags, 5,500 tents, 3,500 airbeds, 2,200 chairs, 950 roll mats and 400 gazebos.
Re-use your tent.
This seems like a reasonable thing to do right? All you need to do is pack your tent up at the end of the festival and take it away with you. Simple. However if you need a little encouragement, check out ReTent. ReTent is a service which provides an uber cool incentive for campers to reuse their tents again and again. Throughout the festival (if they have opted to participate), tents are sprayed with a stamp of attendance by the ReTent team. Your tent becomes a memento of all the festivals you’ve visited! How amazing is that??
Recycle your tent.
If you’d rather recycle your tent, there are so many options to do it these days. You can donate it to a charity when you get home. If you’ve got kids, let them use it in the garden as a play tent. If you don’t have kids, give to a local school for use in forest school lessons. However, if these don’t appeal to you, there are other options here.
Reduce the waste.
Be part of the solution, not the problem. It’s really easy, just don’t leave your tent or gazebo or anything else behind! You managed to get it all to the festival so you can manage to get it all home with you! Even if your tent only cost you £10.00, take it with you! You wouldn’t leave £10.00 in cash laying on the floor, would you?
