Love Your Tent, the first cross festival waste campaign
aimed at campers, wants to know why? Why has leaving tents, camping equipment
and general rubbish become such an endemic part of festival culture that it sees
1 in 5 people (Source AGF, 2012) abandon everything at the festival site on a
Monday morning, in favour of spending a short time taking their tents down and
packing everything up, so they can reuse next time?
The Love Your Tent online survey in association with A
Greener Festival and Buckinghamshire New University is now live and the LYT
team want as many festival goers to fill it in throughout the 2013 festival
season in an attempt to fully understand audience behaviour, so the problem can
be tackled through education and collective action.
“We bought our tent for a tenner down the local
supermarket so I’m not really bothered about it, I can always buy another one
next year”
“We’ve
partied a bit too much and don’t have the energy to take it down and carry it
home”
“I’m actually doing some good because they get sent to
overseas charities for emergency shelter, don’t they?”
“These are some of the responses we got last year when we
asked people at one of the major festivals why they were leaving their tents
behind. These answers were pretty typical but we know it doesn’t have to be
like that, festival’s such as Wychwood and Shambala have proved it’s possible
for audiences to take everything home with them after a weekend of partying so
together we need to appeal to as many festival goers as possible to do the same.
The survey is an opportunity for us to see if there are more behavioural
connections that are revealed on a wider scale such as is it more typical for
younger audiences to leave everything? Is there a gender sway towards disrespectful
behaviour? Is it a combination of factors that contribute to people to choosing
to leave everything or is there one dominant reason? These answers will allow
us to tailor the focus of the Love Your Tent campaign for next year so we can
start to make some headway in limiting camp field waste in the future.” says
Juliet Ross-Kelly of Eco Action Partnership who launched the Love Your Tent
campaign in 2012.
Love Your Tent is a rapidly growing
movement spearheaded by Eco Action Partnership Ltd, with the cooperation of A Greener Festival, the
Association of Independent Festivals and Sounds for Nature (Germany), with the aim of reducing
camping waste and landfill at Festivals around the world, through collective social pressure
and consciousness.
“Assessing festivals around the
world who take great efforts to minimise their environmental impact, one of the
saddest things to see is a waste land of abandoned items from the audience.
Unfortunately tents and camping equipment seem to have become disposable items
in the minds of many. We fully support the Love Your Tent campaign in the hope
that more will realise this sad wastefulness that desperately needs to be
addressed.” comments Co-Founder of A Greener Festival, Claire O’Neill
Last year the Love Your Tent campaign was nominated for a
‘Green Innovations Award’ at the annual festival awards and has since gone from
strength to strength with many festivals pledging to support the campaign by helping
to build awareness throughout 2013 including Wychwood, Truck, Shambala,
Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, Isle of Wight, Body & Soul, Y Not and
Brownstock and with more big names to be announced soon.
The audience survey will be followed up with a festival
organisers survey later in the year.
To answer the survey, follow this link
To join the movement and pledge your support, go to www.facebook.com/LoveYourTent
For more information visit www.loveyourtent.com
Here’s to a sunny, litter free 2013 festival season!
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