There’s a belief that the tents left behind are taken by charities and given to homeless or those who need them. This has been debunked by organisers time and time again as not being true.
enjoy the free piss and shit that comes with it, that's one of the reasons people abandoned them. Went years ago, our neighbours would get out in the middle of the night and just piss anywhere they felt like it.
I used to go to festivals in the early 2000s and never experienced anything like this. Maybe it was the festivals I was attending, but everyone packed their stuff out. I’m sure there were some thing left behind, but nothing like this scale.
yep. last event I went to, there was a large tent peg that had got stuck in a tree root. Someone spent hours struggling with it rather than leave it behind.
Maybe you left early or yea was the size of event. Overnight events where tents are common you cant have a clean place cause at night people just chuck shit around, and whe people see mess it adds up
Yeah, I think it was the festivals I attended. I no longer enjoy that kind of thing, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those same festivals are still nothing like this.
As a Reading Festival veteran from my younger years, it's one of the more chaotic ones. Young crowd, lots of nutters. I've been to plenty of festivals since that are very civilised overall, and I suspect with minimal (comparatively) rubbish left behind. There will of course always be some.
The fact is that if you can afford to go to an event like this, you can afford to leave a tent behind and not deal with it. So it’s a matter of convenience.
"Let’s be honest, festival goers aren’t exactly known for being fiscally or environmentally responsible."
This is tragically hilarious when you remember a lot of people who attend things like this claim to be all "pro-earth" because they use reusable grocery bags and are against seed oils or whatever the fuck social media is pumping into people's heads these days
No, many tents are dirt cheap. They are just using the excuse that the tents are used as charity so they don't have to dismantle, pack up abd haul off their tent. They are just being gross and lazy.
Yeah, even if the charity thing was true, pack it up and drop it off in a collection area. This is 100% making stuff up to justify pure lazyness. Pretty disgusting.
A festival I visited a couple of weeks ago 100% encouraged this. If you had anything useful you should just drop it off at their "zero waste points" and it would go to charity (homeless work/ukraine/refugees). Things like canned food, tents, pots and pans, airbeds were all very much wanted.
Checking Amazon, definitely options for about $40. People absolutely just leave them as they see that $40 as an acceptable loss, especially after the inside is dirty, the outside is still wet from dew when they're packing to leave, aaand the hangover from a few days of festival life. Environmentally, I got nothing. I feel bad for the volunteers who spend time picking all this mess up.
Most summers you can get a cheap crappy tent as low as like $20-30 here in the UK, they'll be poor quality as well which makes people feel even better about dumping them afterwards.
I recently stayed at a hotel that was filled with wedding guests that had a camping night as part of the 3 day wedding, and I got so many tents it paid for my new Blackstone flat top & grill lol.
I've been going to festivals since 2002. As a broke kid, I got a bunch of cool equipment for free like that. But when my tent was on its way out in the late 2010s, I "shopped" for a new one for several years, I would say I searched at about ten festivals. Couldn't find one I would have taken. They were all either broken in some way, or the super cheap garbage type.
It's cheaper to buy a tent and then abandon it while getting to stay at the event then it would be to get accommodations and pay for transportation to and from.
I bet a fair amount of people fly in. They get there without a tent, purchase the cheapest one they can find and then leave it behind. Why would they want to try and repack and pay to check a filthy, cheap, potentially damaged tent that they have no intention of reusing. it's a symptom of a disposable lifestyle.
Yes exactly. I think a lot of people in this thread do not realize tents are as cheap as $20-$35.
$35 is a lot for some people. I would not leave trash/tents behind, but you bet i'm not wasting a couple hours + energy for $35 at the end of a long weekend.
I got to Magic (card game) events and ditch free stuff i get thats too large to fly with. What am i gonna do, stress myself so i can sell a $20 box i don't want? That's a freebie for someone else or i trash it
Same thing happens on Catalina Island. I did get a $200 REI sleeping pad that has a pin prick sized leak that I was able to fix when I got home. The tents that were abandoned were abandoned because they were crappy. We did use the ground covers as extra shade at our campsite.
If you stay in a hotel, you don't get to take the hotel room home. And a tent is WAY cheaper.
They probably spend more on alcohol and drugs, and they don't get to take those home either. Call it a rental. If you're spending hundreds of dollars or more already, the cost of a tent is peanuts.
This is really stupid logic though. If they take it home, it still costs the same... they just don't have to buy another one for the next festival. What point are you arguing for?
This sentence makes no sense. Cleaning up after yourself is free. Don’t mask irresponsibility behind some imagined cost benefit of being a total dickhead to the organizers of the event and to the environment itself.
Their comment makes total sense. You're reading something into it.
It's the thought process of a lazy person. Their comment doesn't preclude that the festival goer is irresponsible. They're flying in, buying something disposable, and then leaving the site and making someone else clean up after them.
in my day, 2008 ish, and I guess its still the same, a large number of festival goers arrived by train, and its a decent walk from the station to the festival site. by monday morning everyone is knackered/hungover/still drunk/high so tents get left
Honestly if I was super hungover from a multi-day bender, I'd probably think it'd be pretty well worth tossing it instead of trying to pack it up into the stupid bag that never seems big enough to fit it again.
Not to mention that cost is probably split amongst friends and if one of them wants to keep it they can pack it up and pay the checked bag fee to bring it back home.
That is a wild generalization. Lots of people spend hard earned money in those experiences because some of them are absolutely worth it. Sorry if you have no passion
But where I'm from, you leave the field how you found it and that involves taking out your own trash.
The problem is, that excuse used to wash. Now almost everyone knows it's not true.
People are just lazy. The issue here is that you can get tents dirt cheap nowadays from Amazon, temu etc. and there's no reason for these people not to just leave them to save carrying them back to the car. It's not exclusive to reading, it happens at most festivals sadly.
The problem is that, for most of human history, it was hard to make things and easy to destroy them. But we’ve suddenly ended up in a world where it’s easy to make things and hard to destroy them. Combine that with the mindset of the previous world, and the fact 8 billion people all want their own personal everything, and we end up with a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year. And all of that just piles up.
a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year
This seems so crazy to me. We've owned the same 2 tents (big one for people/sleeping, small one for storing crap out of the rain/sun) since the 90's. They're a little tired and have a couple patches now but both are fully functional and packed full of memories! We have the set up and take down for those tents down to a science. It's really only a pain when we have to pack it up wet and then set it back up at home to dry, but...that's just part of camping. (We don't do festivals, we're more "chill out in the woods" types)
I'm pretty damn lazy but abandoning tents like this is wild to me. (Old woman shakes fist at cloud)
Sorry to say, but it is all now a disposable world being disposed of.
It's not as if planned obsolescence was guaranteed to become the prevalent paradigm, but, homo sapien nature being what it is, the probability was high for it to become so
Oh absolutely. And the bottom line is, when it's Monday morning, you've had a 3/4/5 day bender and you feel horrific the last thing you want to do it pack up a clunky tent that almost NEVER fits back in it's bag and is heavy.
But most people these days would rather point the finger at "younger generations", or a "different" demographic to themselves than just admit that so many people cause this issue, and it extends beyond just festivals.
Unfortunately it seems to be somewhat ingrained in human nature to be lazy for some people, and in most cases if people were publicly shamed for it, they'd pack the tent. It's mostly the attitudes that you can anonymously dump a tent, and "everyone else is doing it anyway so why shouldn't I?" that cause this
Also the just general amount of rubbish that's just EVERYWHERE. It's of course down to the people dropping it, but the access to bins is nearly non-existant at most camps.
I had to look it up. Apparently the cheapest tent i can find in German Amazon is 20€. That's cheap af. But still, i can't stop and think that that's ~3-4 days of food for me alone.
Happened in my state recently. I ran into someone that went to an event and they said how they tried to upgraded their own tent when they saw so many abandoned but they were all cheap and most already damaged. They got one decent usable tent out of the dozens left.
Some festivals have a scheme but it requires people to actually make the effort to pack up their tents and drop them off at a designated spot. Not just abandon them...
As someone who attends many camp festivals and have camped next to assholes - they know it will have to be cleaned up and thrown out but after 3-4 days of camping they just don’t give AF
If these people actually cared they could and would break the tent down themselves and give it to a charity. These people dont care, they just want to be lazy and trick themselves into pretending it's okay and for a good reason.
Or a tent deposit with security at entry. You get a receipt and a numbered sticker on your tent, and only get your money back when you leave with your packed up tent. It's so wasteful.
This and the shopping trolley problem prove that people only do good things if they think they’ll be judged. Take away that judgement and their true colours shine through.
The shopping cart is honestly the perfect example of this. Minimal effort required, yet people still choose to make their laziness someone else’s problem
That’s literally not what’s happening. At all. OC asked a question. Other people answered the why. Just because I can understand the thought process behind someone being an jerk, that doesn’t make me a jerk or mean I agree with the behavior.
Are murder mystery writers inherently murderers because they can write from inside the head of one? No. Because we recognize the difference between understanding something/someone and agreeing with them.
Between Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple I can't work out which one is the more prolific serial killer. There's no way that every place they travel to just happens to have a murder that they conveniently frame someone for solve
There's also a bit of a final-night tradition that you drink the rest of the alcohol you have and go feral, slashing, burning holes in, or otherwise destroying each other's tents.
But also, they're cheap tents that probably leaked all weekend, they probably have no real intention of camping again anytime soon.
“Ugh Becky… I do not want to deal with this filthy ass gross tent. And I am SO hungoverrrrrrrrr….”
“Duhhhh Emily! You don’t even have to! Just fucking LEAVE IT!”
“Ew! But that’s like… literally littering or some shit?” :: kicks at a broken tent peg ::
“Look, I seen on Reddit or something that some group like comes around and picks them up and gives them away to like… idk the homeless or whatever. So if you leave it? You’re actually a good person. Okay? So let’s just GO already. And leave your gross ass dirt yurt.”
“Ohh! That’s so amazing. 🤩 I’m helping. Yay!”
(And none of that is true - they just get thrown away. Huzzah.)
Me and the wife did what we thought was cocaine with a guy we thought was Post Malone(not really, but he looked like him and i kept calling him that) and decided to totally bail on the second day of a 3 day music festival. Didnt really break our tent and canopy down, just chucked it in the back of the car and bounced. Kinda fucked up, tired, sun burnt and dehydrated, we still managed to clean up after ourselves and leave a beer for the neighbor.
Not really, I've been to several that had clean grounds afterwards, despite people partying hard
I think there's a possible connection between the type of music and the type of people who attend. By and large, country music festival attendees seem to be the worst offenders of leaving trash
It disgusts me. I was a regular festival goer in the early 2000s, including Leeds/Reading. I would never have even considered leaving my shit behind, however young, tired and hungover I was. It’s shameful. When my kids are a bit older I’ll have no problems with them going, but I’ll definitely be checking out and checking back in ALL their kit.
Because they know someone else will clean it up for them. They see the good, conscientious people who go around picking up all the litter as idiot suckers who save them a job. That’s how all litterers think.
The majority of people who go to festivals are rich kids who’ve parents have paid for their tickets and all their equipment. They don’t go camping normally, at least not in a tent that doesn’t have 25 square meters of space. So they don’t need to take it with. As their rich kids they’re also entitled, so they think the troglodytes (their words, not mine) who work the festival and own the land should clean up after them.
Tents are fairly cheap, many are wet and damaged, folks don’t want to carry around a wet muddy tent that didn’t cost that much in the grand scheme, and then on top of that many fill them with their rubbish so they see the tent as a sort of bin lol
And none of that is anyone’s problem but the person who decided to utilize a tent.
Truly all those people are scum of the earth. Shows em exactly the type of person you are.
There should be someone at the edge of the tent site handing out tickets for littering. A good $200 or so should ensure they pick up their shitty $45 Temu tents
I used to collect leftover stuff after festivals (to take to the next festivals). Most of those tents are not reuseable. Poles snapped and fabric ripped from drunks. Cheap gear to begin with. Same with most of the other camping equipment. What people leave behind is usually broken.
Mostly just found half drunk liquor bottles. For an alcoholic living in my van, that was the real treasure. I scavenged like 10,000,000 tent stakes, too. Could sell those for scrap.
Because you can buy relatively cheap ones. You can buy a tent for around $100, or find used ones for less possibly. People who only get it for a festival may see it as judt the price of going amd don't care about keeping the tent
I might have a skewed perspective having only ever gone to festivals in the western and mid west US, and also grew up with the idea of leave no trace backpacking in wild country, but is there just less of a culture of camping in the UK? I know if I buy a new tent for a festival, I'm also going to have opportunity to use that tent at least a few times throughout the next year. It might be, at least in part, an attitude of, I'm never going to use that again so why bother figuring out how to take down and pack up the tent? Maybe no one ever showed or explained the reasons to bother with cleaning up after yourself when camping.
The hike to the campsite is a ball ache for a majority of festivals, combine that with a week of drinking/drugs/lack of sleep and people can't be fussed with packing up and carrying their things back
I can admit I left mine when were 17 because we couldn’t be fucked taking it down so hung over and no one else was either. Since have learned and would never do that again.
Easier to abandon your 50$ tent that was engineered and manufactured in some temu affiliated sweatshop to last a whole of 3 days than to bring it back.
A real answer- there aren't a lot of European festivals with camping, so this is a once a year event, a lot of the young people just buy a crappy tent, use it for the weekend, then leave it there. In the states some people will do this but most people take their campsites home because there are a lot more festivals they can attend, plus camping is a big hobby in a lot of the states.
I did once, the zip broke after day 1 (lukcily it didnt rain), then the innertent got ripped and a pole broke because someone fell on it on day 2. Me and my then bf were young teens at the time and had to haul all the camping stuff back on several trains and busses in our enormous backpacks. A trip that would be 6 hours long. The tent was only 25 euros. We didnt bother to pack it up. Some guys were thrilled that they were allowed to set it on fire for us.
Nowadays i would definitely not let people burn it and would just haul it to a garbage can myself. But i was 16, and the enviroment was hardly talked about back then.
From personal experience: Cheap airlines like Ryanair charge almost nothing for tickets but luggage costs a fortune (often like 20€ for a flight from one European country to another but luggage is 65€ per piece).
So when we were in our 20s I have to confess that we often bought very cheap tents and summer sleeping bags from lidl for 20-ish € and just left them to save the luggage fees on the return trip. But at least we folded them together and put them next to the trash can. Still fucked but well...
Yeah, honestly I'd think that locals would go through there and take down tents just to keep them lol At the very least, let volunteers go through, keep whatever they wanted, and THEN pay people to go through and clean haha
After a multiple day long drug fest the last thing you have to do is take apart and pack a tent. Suddenly just leaving instead seems like a much easier option. (I do not support it and have personally achieved getting the tent into the car)
There isn’t much of a deterrent - not that it should be up to that but I think it’s a large part of why.
Camping equipment can be incredibly cheap so the financial incentive is low.
Enough people do it that there isn’t going to be a critical mass of shame.
The people who do this get to leave and forget about the mess.
Reading tends to have a younger audience, so an argument can be made that there is a maturity element to this.
The festival isn’t adding any penalties for this (I have been to other festivals where you pay a £20 deposit per ticket and get it back if you bring a filled bag of trash or recycling).
People will be hungover and less likely to want to do it relative to a normal morning.
I assume that some people flew, bought the tent nearby, then couldn't take it home. That's not the only reason, but it is a reason at every major festival.
Because the festival is extremely messy with people being drunk, high, and filthy from a weekend of getting fucked up and not washing. The toilets last time I went were effectively holes above a skip.
So people buy the cheapest tent, and then come Monday morning when they're filthy, hungover and coming down they just take one look at their tent and go "fuck it".
One Sunday night it was so crazy with people doing crazy shit that we just left in the middle of the night.
It ain't right, but that's why. It's a festival that's pretty immature, wasteful and selfish in its vibe. At least it was when I stopped going.
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u/crowhouse 8h ago
Why do so many people abandon tents?