Festivals launch campaign asking retailers to stop selling single-use tents to help reduce plastic waste

'We call upon major retailers to stop profiting from disposable culture'

Single-use tents should be banned to help prevent plastic pollution, festival organisers have said.

The Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) – an organisation that represents and empowers independent UK festivals like Shambala, Boomtown and Boardmasters – is urging retailers to stop marketing and selling tents as single-use items.

It is also calling on festival-goers to take their tents home with them at the end of the event.

The initiative comes after the AIF found that, while improvements have been made by festivals to reduce the amount of plastic they use, abandoned tents remain a real problem.

A report published by the AIF in 2018 found that 93 per cent of festivals had ditched plastic straws, while 40 per cent banned the sale of drinks in single-use plastic on-site.

Similarly, 40 per cent replaced single-use cups with reusable cups, 67 per cent sold branded reusable drinks bottles, and 87 per cent promoted the use of reusable bottles.

However, it also found that 10 per cent of people attending festivals had abandoned a tent that year – a figure it estimates is the equivalent to 875 tonnes of plastic waste.

According to the AIF, the average tent is made largely of plastic and weighs approximately 3.5kg – the equivalent of 8,750 straws.

It also revealed that an estimated 250,000 tents are left at music festivals across the UK every year.

“We call upon major retailers to stop marketing and selling tents and other camping items as essentially single-use, and profiting from disposable culture,” said Paul Reed, CEO of the AIF.

“The message here is not ‘buy a more expensive tent’… festival audiences can take positive action and reduce their carbon footprint simply by taking their tent home and reusing it, ensuring that it doesn’t become a single-use item this summer.”

The new campaign has been praised by hundreds of people on social media, with many agreeing that the “throwaway society should be challenged”.

“It's funny to think that some of the people who protest against plastic straws are also the same people who buy a plastic tent for one or two nights at a festival and just leave it there,” one person commented.

Another added: “I've always found it so frustrating leaving festivals and seeing so much rubbish, living amenities and tents just left.

“Not only does it worry me that individuals just have relatively little regard of the cost that they're just throwing away but also environmental damage caused.”

Others, who admitted they have been guilty of leaving their tents behind at festivals, said the campaign has inspired them to act differently.

“Of the five occasions I have left a tent at a festival, three times it was they'd been egged, once because it was too big to carry [sic],” one person wrote.

“Last year I thought it would be collected for charity. Won’t do it again.”

Speaking to The Independent, Teresa Moore, director at A Greener Festival, previously noted that it is true that some festivals have chosen to collaborate with charities which invite them to collect leftover tents for homeless people or refugees.

However, she believes that this plan has somewhat backfired.

“Unfortunately this has turned into one of those festival myths: ‘it is now alright to leave your tent because they all go to charity’,” she said.

“I have found this during my ongoing research but it has become widely recognised that this has unintentionally created an even bigger problem.”

The campaign comes just months after the Foresight Future of the Sea report revealed that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is set to treble in a decade unless action is taken to deal with the problem.

Experts warned that plastic is one of the biggest threats facing the world’s seas, while highlighting other keys issues including rising sea levels, warming oceans and metal and chemical pollution.