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.
Relative to the price of the festival, or compared to the price of a hotel room, they're really cheap, even if you only use it once, ESPECIALLY if several people are sharing the cost. They probably spend more on alcohol than they do on the tents.
I just checked Amazon, a 2 person tent can be as cheap as 40 bucks, and a six person like 100. so if you and 3 friends pitch 25 bucks you get a tent that you don't care about.
Makes me feel bad because I have a 2-man tent that was like 200 bucks, but it's also a more specialized tent compared to whatever you'll get at amazon.
Cheap tents can be like £20 they are shit and fall apart after one use (if they last that long) not defending it but the tents are destined for landfill before they are even bought. The world we love in is insane.
Tent's are relatively cheap disposable for people, since they don't have to pay to lug it back to their home by air. This was similar when I went to Florida for vacation, when I went to Walmart. So much tourists, and lots of cheap beach toys for kids to play and abandon.
The cost to take down safely (needles, sharp objects etc), transport, clean, sanitize and store until given away would almost guarantee the process costs more than buying new tents in bulk from a wholesaler.
I see you are not a festival goer. These mostly are known as "popups" (at least in Germany). You can buy such tents for 40€ on Amazon. My friends bought cheap popup tents and chairs like that with the intent of leaving them behind. So they can leave quickly and without much weight while being hangover. Downside is, while I was at the open air festival with my genuine hiking tent and the others with their cheap popups I was the only one not wet and sick after a day of heavy rain. All tents but mine where submerged in water. All who slept in cheap tents had become sick. I slept like a baby completely dry.
Anyway yeah, pricing for throw-away tents and sometimes chairs is precalculated in the festival trip. I.e. they don't care.
I want to clarify that I am completely against this behaviour and have never left trash at these sites. I have also not been to a festival for several years now.
you can pick them up in Aldi or Lidl for a tenner. I've had one in my garden shed for twenty years, never used. It's probably completely unfit for purpose by now.
Someone that goes to a festival for the weekend is probably paying a few hundred dollars just to get in. Possible they'll drop another hundred just to park somewhere for the weekend.
Then they're going to pay hundreds more in food, beverages, merchandise, etc.
I dont think the people leaving behind unopened booze and tents are the picture of fiscal responsibility. It it literally more convenient for them to leave it behindm
It is but if you're flying in for a festival it may be less expensive to buy one locally and ditch it than to pay for shipping of your own personal tent. It's definitely gross but this is why it happens
You can easily buy a bundle of tent,mat,sleeping bag for sub £40. Shit quality, but fine for a night. You're not a camping sort of person, so you're not going to be reusing it. So you're basically paying £40 for shelter for the night, and then those nice people come around and collect all the unwanted ones, and give them to charity (for clarity, this does not happen) so you're basically doing a service for charity!
You can get cheap tents for like $30-40. They are very low quality and tend to leak and tear easily, but for a festival you probably aren’t staying anyway if the weather gets shitty. If they didn’t put down a tarp there is a pretty good chance they are already damaged.
Those tents all fall in the $100 or less category, a sum of money likely not to bother your average festival goer who spends more than that on everything else. Some of them are probably even $60 or less.
Tents, all things considered, are insanely cheap for what they are. Anyone who buys the really expensive, high quality tents is likely an avid camper and isn't going to leave it behind.
Last tent i bought was under $30 and lasted me about 4 years until i was too lazy to flod it back up and it got moldy. Thats probably the cost of like 2 beers and a hot dog at the festival.
Not that i condone littering, just pointing out that you can get tents for cheap. Im of the belief that you should leave your camp site looking like no one was there, but most of my camping has been in the backwoods and we were probably trespassing at many of these sites now that i think about it.
Probably the same people who leave a complete mess in the theater because "hey, that's what their getting paid to do. If I don't, they'll be out of a job"
I went to a 4th of July party in San Diego at the beach (20 years ago)
Never saw so many people at the beach in my life. Shoulder the shoulder for miles.
After the party my brother left all his beer cans on the beach. I asked him why he wasn't cleaning them up? He says everyone just leaves the cans and the homeless people come at night and clean the beach with a fine-tooth comb.
He said by the next day you won't see a single can anywhere.
The next day, he was completely right. Not a single can to be seen.
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.
Not true. There were periods of history where things were easy to make and even mass produced. Pottery in the Roman Republic and Empire were mass produced and people would just chuck them if they didn't want to keep using it. It's why a lot of times you can find huge ammounts of pottery in seemingly random locations.
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.
yeah, you have burnt out/hungover people who probably just want to walk away and go home and get cleaned up. So they leave all their shit for someone else to deal with.
Decathlon has even introduced refunds after use to avoid all the waste... still no one cares... they just see it as literally not worth their time to take it down.
I did notice at We Out Here the rental tent section was absolutely massive, so more and more people with the cash can just do that and save themselves the hassle I suppose.
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.
It is true. V Festival used to do it for the last few years it existed. The charity came round with leaflets and advised if leaving tents to collapse them (indicating nobody inside), leave them empty with poles in situ. They were then wrapped as is and collected up to be used for humanitarian aid, sold, repurposed, charities etc etc. Rotary club if I recall.
It will continue to be a "belief" because it's way more convenient to leave your shitty shit behind. People aren't stupid, it's not a selfless act, so yeah it doesn't matter what the truth is.
Id guess its because they probably buy cheap tents for $20-30 and just see them as disposable. A night in a hotel room costs $100+ a night... so a one time use tent is cheap in comparison. I personally wouldn't leave it behind, but everyone is different.
What's their reasoning for not donating to charities or the homeless? Would be a great PR campaign and the area has to be cleaned up anyway. Seems wasteful and lazy
It used to be true. My scout troop, amongst others , was allowed to go in and take anything they could find, tents, chairs, beers etc, before the rest was sent to landfill.
Probably the same people that leave their trash behind at a fast food table or movie theatre because "there's people whose job it is to clean it up". "Bring my shopping cart back to where it belongs? I'll just leave it wherever to protect the jobs of the people who clear the parking lot of carts."
It's a true fact - Salvaging is offered to anyone who applies for each festival and we take away anything that is left behind that can be used. I've had 25 + tents (plus airbeds, pumps, inflatable pillows etc) from the last time we attended the Leeds festival.
In Leeds we have a charity that does this. They collect abandoned festival items and more. They'll rent them out for 1-20£ and if you return it, you get money back. If not, it goes to charity. Lots of people I know go there to rent tents, sleeping bags, etc for festivals but they also offer things like air compressors, carpet cleaners etc. It's a great system.
The Gear Closet in Chattanooga actually does collect the tents and other items that can be resold and they sell it at their store from Bonaroo. It’s a huge income for them and they give back by cleaning up waters and streams around the area.
Some festivals make an attempt. We used to have the Secret Garden Party here, and local cub and scout troops collect the tents, make sure they work and sell them for cheap. Even then it's not an excuse to leave them strewn about, and even less so all the litter.
I'd wander around and grab every decent name brand one I could find, pack it up and then resell. If I was anywhere near where this happens I'd be there every year lol.
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u/Adventurous_Emotion9 8h ago
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.