r/Wellthatsucks 9h ago

Reading festival 2026

12.6k Upvotes

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1.5k

u/Few-Alarm3436 8h ago

People suuuuuck!

457

u/Little-Wonder-5037 8h ago

Honestly, sometimes the sheer amount of unnecessary waste at festivals really does make you lose faith in people. 😭

79

u/sugrqbez 8h ago

If you sort through it and try to clean stuff up afterwards you usually find some good things people leave behind.

66

u/CableTVOfficial 8h ago

We went to bonnaroo in 24 when it got canceled from the flooding and we scooped up about 1k worth of rugs alone that just needed to be cleaned. 3 big ass area rugs and a couple smaller ones a hammock with stand, as well as just random camping gear chairs, canopies

22

u/Aggravating-Alarm-16 7h ago

I've got to say, the blue rug really tied the room together

https://giphy.com/gifs/Phn9GxCnG7agJyAcxl

1

u/CableTVOfficial 6h ago

I tied 4 rooms together on that trip
https://giphy.com/gifs/aNTmc4keX4Fva

3

u/Bonitabanana 7h ago

Heck yes. Rugs are costly but not always easy to clean.
Well done for that effort!

36

u/whitelines4president 8h ago

I used to do this after Werchter, a big festival in Belgium. Always came home with a trunk full of alcohol.

2

u/Dumbwaiter819 3h ago

a massive reason why I don't drink anymore is because of the cost. I just could not afford to buy alcohol on top of my grocery budget

The idea of people just leaving alcohol behind like it's not worth keeping (unopened as you clarified in a follow-up) is just downright infuriating

-6

u/Laurier-Henri 8h ago

But gross - don’t want to drink a bottle someone else’s sucked .

12

u/whitelines4president 8h ago

They are closed bottles or cans ofcourse. And the neet thing is, you can clean them.

35

u/glassskyline 8h ago

Volunteering to dig through festival trash for cheap loot is wild

66

u/sugrqbez 8h ago

It’s not cheap usually. People drop pretty valuable shit when they’re drunk.

39

u/eloquent8 8h ago

I worked on a festival bin team this summer and someone found an arcteryx jacket, £600 new online

19

u/tfhermobwoayway 8h ago

Never seen a hiking trail, I bet.

12

u/eloquent8 8h ago

The bit that did make me slightly sad for the original owner is he'd sharpied his name into the collar lol (we found the jacket after the punters had left)

3

u/redwildflowermeadow 5h ago

I'm sorry, what does punter mean? I've heard it in UK tv shows for a while and I'm realizing now I don't actually know what it means.

5

u/eloquent8 5h ago

Thats alright! UK slang can get a bit out of hand lol.

I'd say it's a word for customer, but mostly used in the context of a pub. I can't fully explain why but punter makes me think "customer who buys alcohol" lol so it works for the ticket holders at a festival. I think it's a bit of an old word, I wouldn't use it at a supermarket but at a local market I might?

I didn't Google for this I just over thought it and you've ended up with a right paragraph lol but I hope its useful!

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12

u/Few-Cheesecake5175 8h ago

The irony is that some of that stuff is probably worth more than the effort required to take it home

4

u/cheezy_dreams88 6h ago

It’s not cheap dude. I havent done it in years, but i volunteered a couple times back in 00s and you would find so much stuff. Jewelry, cash, unopened bottles of alcohol, cases of beers, drugs, cell phones, chargers, found a brand new in box iPad my last year volunteering cleanup. Coolers, camping stuff galore, shoes, clothes. Almost anything you can think of really. And as a poor 21 year old, it was awesome. Sell the clothes at second hand stores for credit, keep camping stuff I could use, stock my bar up for months, and usually went home with a couple hundred in cash found in tent.

2

u/Most_Structure9568 5h ago

Yes but most of this shit goes to landfills

6

u/Born_Ingenuity6956 8h ago

You had faith in people?

2

u/S0m3Rand0mGuy85 7h ago

I was working at Coachellafest one year. I slipped on someone's discarded fruit that they threw on the ground at night while leaving in full view of everyone. I landed on my knee hard. Not one person offered to help. I had people walking around me and that was it.

1

u/Born_Ingenuity6956 7h ago

In all fairness, I have been the one to try to help someone only to embarrass that person and end up having them get mad at me because they were frustrated. So if I am not directly asked for help and the situation doesn't look dire, then I may not offer my help either on a whim.

2

u/Kampfkugel 7h ago

It can but I was really surprised when I saw pictures from German festivals like Wacken or Summer Breeze. Both were so clean and people took everything back home. The second Festival even got mentioned in one of the biggest German news portals "tagesschau" as a positive example of clean festivals. Both are big metal festivals, but I dont think the music genre is the biggest reason why they are so clean. I think it's because they listend to their fans when it was just as full of trash as in the video and they took action (like real collecting points for sleeping bags and mattresses for the homeless).

2

u/merryjoanna 4h ago

I went to a festival called Ziontific in 2018. It had a lot of reggae and a little bit of rap music. It was awesome. Everyone pretty much had the right idea. Clean up after yourselves or the place won't allow the festival back next year. Unfortunately then COVID happened and there wasn't another Ziontific anyway.

As I was leaving there still was a little debris left for the festival people to clean up. It was in two big piles by the stage. It probably would have filled just 2 or 3 regular sized dumpsters. It wasn't strewn all through the grounds. There wasn't any cigarette butts around either. We were told to be careful about them, because the place is where kids camp each year as well. I already always made sure to put my butts in a Tupperware until I could get to a trashcan, so it was business as usual for me.

2

u/saturnshighway 8h ago

Of course. Same with movie theatres, etc. Year by year I see how we’re such lazy entitled stupid people (sorry to be so negative but it’s true)

1

u/Architorture_66 7h ago

The really sucky and ironic ones are when events like Earth Day festivals are over.  24 hours of push and agreement of saving our planet only to leave a completely littered field behind when it's over.

1

u/Own_Bison6467 5h ago

Overnight tenting festivals are awful. I prefer big city festivals (like OSHEAGA/Lollapalooza) where you can just stay at a hotel/AirBnB, go and watch acts and last show finishes at 11. And then you get to explore city, party like a normal person, not tenting and drinking like a hobo.

1

u/the_nin_collector 4h ago

lmfao.

Like one tomahawk missile is 100x this.

Like 1 flight from Taylor Swift's jet doesn't equal all that waste. As bad as it looks.

We don't do shit about the things that really matter. This LOOKS bad. But it's a fucking tiny drop of rain in a bucket. We have things that we change that make MAJOR change. And we do not do fucking shit. We don't fucking hold our government accountable for things they can change, and we fucking worship billionaires.

1

u/Aegi 4h ago

In my view only people who never actually cared about the human species in the first place could feel this way because why would some negative behavior from some people in a scenario that doesn't really matter compared to things like child hunger or access to education, influence my perspective of the entire species enough that just a singular act like that would make me switch allegiances from being faithful in people to no longer being faithful in people?

-1

u/Kaiisim 5h ago

So this is what makes people lose faith in humanity? Litter?

Not the murders rapes or genocides. Litter.

Yeah explains why the world sucks.

2

u/Lissba 5h ago

Whenever folks are like “oh humans can be good what about conservation efforts?!”

Conserving nature from WHOM exactly?

u/Few-Alarm3436 14m ago

All the rubbish on Everest makes my blood boil

2

u/klovasos 5h ago

Yet I still get judged (even here on reddit) because I love my dog more than random strangers....

2

u/mfGLOVE 3h ago

It’d be nice if they could charge a cleanup fee for each of these people that leave trash/tents.

6

u/1__ViPeR 8h ago

Humans suck. We are a plague

1

u/BMBenzo 5h ago

It should be on the people that host the event to clean it after

1

u/FlametopFred 1h ago

People don’t deserve nice things

1

u/the_onion_nebula 1h ago

The human species is a failed experiment.

u/chicletsinbulk 21m ago

The majority of these people are climate change activists

1

u/Psy_Kiik 7h ago

It's so funny watching the next new gen of kids growing up, always thinking they're different, lecturing people on how things are changing, how their generation is the one bringing the change. Push comes to shove they then can't even be bothered to clean up after themselves because they're tired and hungover - a micro example of how people talk big, especially online, but in reality people don't change. 'Progress' is an illusion and the sooner you realise it the sooner you can stop wittering about stupid little social causes on the internet and re-focus on the big one - saving us, and not in the religious BS sense.

We need top down authoritarian control telling people how to live with an iron fist or we're fucked as a species. All you ever get otherwise is lip service, wishful thinking and denial. And no, it wouldn't be fun but its the only out we have.

-1

u/Lots_of_bricks 8h ago

Should be the top comment!!

0

u/unfortunatebag 8h ago

It's really not that bad.

In college I worked on a parks crew that cleaned these festival sights up.

It all just goes into a pile then right into the dumpster.

2

u/zackflag 1h ago

How in hell's name is that "not that bad"? Deranged take right here.

-2

u/FlamingoVisible1947 6h ago

There's a cleanup crew that you pay for as part of your entrance ticket. If you've ever been to even just a concert you'll know there's not remotely enough space to throw your trash.

3

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 5h ago

You think that justifies littering, but it doesn't.

1

u/FancyVideo609 4h ago

This is ragebait btw yes the kids (16-18yo) who go to Reading Festival suck but the site is not left like that for long. Go to a football match and you'll see the same shit in the stands after the game

2

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 4h ago edited 4h ago

So two wrongs make a right? It's okay to litter at a festival, because it's common for people to litter at football matches? It's okay to litter because someone else will clean it up?

None of that is logical. How about no one litters, because littering is immoral?

0

u/FancyVideo609 4h ago

Honestly I think that's a very immature and narrow way to consider the problem "welp two wrongs dont make a right littering bad!". My point is that this problem is being misrepresented in order to rage bait Redditors into thinking this is how the festival was left permanently. If you want to debate "Why humans leave litter in private events" then I'm sure there's plenty of people for you to chat to

0

u/FlamingoVisible1947 5h ago

This isn't littering because there is a cleanup crew... It's 100% expected that trash will be left on site and you pay for its removal.