Back To The Motherland - Isle of Wight Festival 2013

The Isle of Wight Festival is always a special place for us, it's where we worked as sustainability consultants for six years, winning a host of awards and it is where Love Your Tent was born. During our time working with the festival we were shocked at more and more tents, camping equipment and general rubbish being left on the Monday morning and knowing because of recycling facilities and the festival organisers time constraints at having to return the site to normal use as quickly as possible, nearly all of this abandoned waste was going straight to landfill. 

We had in our six years working with the festival tried to communicate to the audience that this wasn't acceptable but nothing seemed to be working and we knew most other festivals not only in the UK but worldwide were in the same position, so we figured the only way to tackle this now endemic problem was with one voice and one message that was repeated across festival culture and that's when Love Your Tent became our mantra. 

After a soft launch of Love Your Tent at Isle of Wight Festival in 2012, where we ran our own Love Your Tent camping field called RESPECT, the campaign has gone from strength to strength. We now have a worldwide partner focusing on recruiting European and global festivals and since the amazing support from Isle of WIght Festival many other UK festivals have signed up to the campaign and have pledged to reach out to their audiences and spread the Love Your Tent and Take it Home message.

So we were excited to be back at the Isle of Wight Festival this year to catch up with all the lovely people working on it and to again run the RESPECT campfield where the 1200 occupants had signed up to our Tent Commandments pledging to take everything home with them and to be respectful to everyone else in the field. We're really glad to say that once again this field had such an amazing relaxed community vibe where everyone looked out for each other and just as importantly kept it clean all weekend, so there was no fighting with piles of rubbish to get back to your tent coming back from the main arena. The vibe was also helped by some extra facilities we organised for Respecters over the weekend such as kinetic mobile phone charging units using pedal power and tent stencilling, or body stencilling if you're our new pin-up, Dave.

Feedback from Respecters was amazing this year "This is by far the best camping experience I have had at the festival. I will be at the front of the queue for my pass next year. Thank you very much. How every field should look" Mark Grimes told us. "The whole festival needs to be like this rather than wading through beer cans and rubbish! Love Your Tent rocks!" says Andy Emery and Sue O'Brien said "All fields should be left like this! Will be back next year! Thank you Love Your Tent for helping make a brilliant weekend, spectacular". It's great to get such great feedback as it proves that a significant percentage of festival audiences want the camping experience to change and are prepared to do their bit to change it. With a little bit of collective thinking and action we can change the way people behave at festivals. 

We are pleased to say that whilst the waste contractor at the Isle of Wight Festival waited for everyone to leave on Monday morning so they could come in and sweep up the abandoned rubbish and tents from general camping, by lunchtime the RESPECT field looked like this with only three tents left standing. One of which we will be reusing for a Love Your Tent office at other festivals and of the two left as they were badly damaged in the wind one we managed to donate to a new home (Ellie from our team says she can fix it!) and one we have broken down and recycled. Pretty amazing result.

We were also really encouraged by the support we received outside of RESPECT by artists and the audience. It made for an exciting weekend of spreading the Love Your Tent and Take It Home message. We met some amazing people.

Bastille

Elizabeth McGovern

Imagine Dragons

John Giddings, Festival Promoter

Kids in Glass Houses

Laura Mvula

Lawson

Leeroy, The Prodigy

Lianne Le Havas

Respectful Gnomes

Thanks Girls!

So I guess what we are trying to say in a roundabout way is thank-you everyone at the Isle of Wight Festival for believing in and supporting Love Your Tent from the outset and setting an example for other festivals to follow.

Big Love Big Respect
x 

PS The music was pretty amazing too x 

Insight Interview No.5

As we get ready to board the ferry over to the Isle of Wight Festival for a weekend of running the RESPECT camp field and spreading the Love Your Tent and Take it Home message it seemed only fitting to get the camping low down from Isle of Wight boss, John Giddings:

1. Do you own a tent and if so how long have you had it?
YES – OUR DAUGHTER IS USING IT FOR DUKE OF EDINBURGH

2. Where is your favourite camping destination and why?
ANYWHERE WHERE IT IS NOT RAINING…
I LIKE CORNWALL

3. Apart from IOW are there any festivals you look forward to over the summer?
WERCHTER IN BELGIUM

4. Why do you think the UK embraces outdoor festivals and as a result has an enviable leading festival scene?
IT IS NOW A RITE OF PASSAGE FOR A YOUNG PERSON
IT IS SAFE,AND YOU CAN MEET PEOPLE

5. Does IOW have a problem with discarded tents and camping equipment?
YES

6. It’s estimated across festival land, that 1 in 5 people leave their tent behind after each festival does that surprise you?
YES – THEY SHOULD NOT BE LAZY,AND TAKE THEM AWAY

7. Why do you think think people leave their tent and camping equipment behind?
THEY DON’T WANT MUDDY THINGS – WET ,TOO HEAVY,LAZY? AND THE EQUIPMENT IS CHEAP

8. What do you think can be done to change people’s behaviour and to value their possessions and the environment more?
TELL THEM THE HARM IT CAUSES – EDUCATE THEM,OFFER THEM SOMETHING!

9. Do you have a funny camping story?
A FOX STOLE MY SAUSAGES

10. What are your current top three tracks to listen to around the campfire?
BASTILLE POMPEII
IAN HUNTER ALL THE YOUNG DUDES
KODALINE ALL I WANT

11. Any top camping tips?
BE NICE TO YOUR NEIGHBOURS

12. In your experience is there anything festivals can be doing more of to make it easy for punters to take everything home with them?
NOT REALLY – THEY ARE VERY TIRED AT THE END OF A LONG WEEKEND!!

13. What do you think of the first cross-festival waste campaign aimed at campers, Love Your Tent?
IT’S A GREAT IDEA...
  

Isle of Wight Festival at Seaclose Park runs from 13th-16th June 2013 with headliners including Stone Roses, The Killers and Bon Jovi

Wychwood Experience

The Wychwood Experience

We kicked off our 2013 Love Your Tent tour with a trip to Wychwood Festival over the bank holiday weekend, none of us had been before so we were excited to see what this boutique festival at Cheltenham Racecourse had to offer.

We weren't disappointed, thank-you Wychwood you gave us sunshine, music, comedy, workshops and with a hot-tub thrown in, we were happy, happy, happy.

But let's not forget the real reason we were there ........ Wychwood were one of the first festivals this year to pledge their support of the Love Your Tent campaign and vowed to help us create awareness of the simple Take It Home! message. They did this even though, according to them, in their nine year history they haven't really had a problem with abandoned tents so we were intrigued to have a look for ourselves and see the flip-side of the devastation scenes we have been used to seeing at other festivals.

Amazingly this is what their campsites looked like ......

We looked and looked to find evidence of bad behaviour and this is all we found, I'm not sure if you can actually see it but in the middle of this picture there is a white bit of paper someone has thrown on the floor:

With 12,000 visitors enjoying the festival over the weekend this is an incredible display of how an audience can collectively make such a difference to a festival experience and explains why for the last two years our RESPECT camp field at the Isle of Wight has been booked within a matter of days, as people seek out like minded eco and socially savvy people to camp with to avoid the sea of rubbish that accumulates over the weekend in most festival campsites.

When the festival organisers at Wychwood told us they didn't have a problem they weren't kidding, at the end of the festival they had three yes THREE abandoned tents. Wychwood audience you may all (apart from three of you!!!) go to the top of the class for effort and enthusiasm.

As our tour rolls on to the Isle of Wight this coming weekend it will be good to start getting a picture by comparison as to what makes an audience more likely to leave rubbish lying around throughout the weekend and abandon their tents and camping equipment at the end. Is it audience demograhic?   The provision organisers put in place for waste collection and recycling? is it all down to awareness???? We don't have all the answers right now but at the end of the summer we really want to know why at least 1 in 5 people attending UK festivals leave without their tent.

Happy Camping,

The Love Your Tent team xxx