Electric Picnic’s waste mountain: ‘Why would I bring my tent home with me when it’s broken?’

As throngs of Electric Picnic festivalgoers trudge from the campsites to their cars on Monday morning, an abandoned red two-man tent takes flight, skidding along a pathway. “Jesus,” one woman says, almost falling over after the tent hits her and her boyfriend as they walk past the Janice Joplin campsite, lugging rucksacks, sleeping bags and camping gear. He pushes it out of the way so they can carry on walking.

This rogue tent isn’t the only airborne item in the annual abandonment of a mountain of camping gear. Several more tents are blowing along, tripping people up as they leave the Stradbally estate, where many other tents and gazebos collapsed in the weekend’s heavy rain, and now carpet the waterlogged ground.

“Why would I bring it with me when it’s broken? It’s going in the bin either way,” says Sean, from Kildare, who’s one of two young men packing up their bags in the Charlie Chaplin campsite at 8am on Monday.

Sarah Manning from Limerick is carefully folding her tent in the Oscar Wilde site, nearby. “Mine lasted well. A lot of people had theirs flooded, but it held up. Would be a shame to leave it behind,” she says.

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The Jimi Hendrix campsite has largely emptied of people by 11am, but there are still tents, blow-up mattresses and broken gazebos on the grass, which is also littered with empty beer cans, leftover food and other rubbish.

Three friends decide they don’t want one of their camping chairs, and throw it on to a small pile of other discarded items. “Wahey,” they cheer when it soars over the tent next to them before landing on the ground. They turn away and finish packing up the items they will be bringing home.

Some people have tried to pick up their rubbish — black bags filled with empty containers and unwanted belongings are everywhere. They may have been mindful of the outrage at the amount of litter left behind after Electric Picnic in previous years; in 2018 so many tents were abandoned that a bulldozer was required to remove them all.

Melvin Benn, director of Festival Republic, which runs Electric Picnic, says the key to making the 70,000-capacity festival greener is for attendees to reuse their belongings. “That goes for tents in particular. But of course we can’t force people to do things. If they do leave their tents behind, that’s not a problem. This happens. We then just collect it responsibly, separate it and recycle everything that can be recycled,” he says.

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“Some of you will take a picture of rubbish and put it on the front page and say the Electric Picnickers left a load of rubbish. People do leave rubbish, but what you don’t always go on to say is this will all be separated appropriately, and reused and/or recycled.”

Voice, an environmental group, says festival-waste issues comes up every year, but we are “nowhere nearer to solving them”. “We believe that it is not simply down to the festivalgoers. Yes, we all have personal responsibility when it comes to leaving no trace behind us, but the festival organisers must lead by example and be held accountable for the generation of so much waste,” says a spokeswoman, Lyndsey O’Connell. “They could incentivise festivalgoers to bring their tents home by charging a tent tax, paid for at the point of sale and returned to them as they leave the campsite, tent in arms.”