Can the World’s Biggest Music Festival Be Sustainable? Glastonbury Is Trying : NPR

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:

A year after Woodstock in the United States, a British farmer decided to do the same thing and invited rock stars to his family farm. That was in southwest England in 1970. And today, 54 years later, Glastonbury is one of the biggest music festivals in the world. This weekend’s lineup includes Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Shania Twain. To this day, the five-day festival still manages to live up to its founder’s motto: Leave no trace on the earth. NPR’s Lauren Frayer explains how.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: It feels like every inch of grass is invaded by a sea of ​​multicolored tents. Hundreds of thousands of people camp here. The area is dotted with these massive stages, several stories high. There is even a pop-up hotel with a swimming pool installed.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).

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FRAYER: Here, plastic and glass are prohibited. Everything is biodegradable and compostable. But there is still a lot of trash left behind by hundreds of thousands of campers. And it’s up to Atholl Lawson and his team to get them back.

ATHOLL LAWSON: They’re all volunteers. They come through like a flock of locusts.

FRAYER: He commands an army of garbage collectors, deployed day and night, to empty 15,000 trash cans.

LAWSON: Paper cups, white bags, cans, here we go. We collect the bags.

FRAYER: Oh, it’s color coded.

LAWSON: Yeah, so…

FRAYER: And they have little grabbers and…

LAWSON: Yeah, little gripping tools, lots of bags. We’ve got that down to an art now, so…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Copy that.

FRAYER: About 100 dump trucks full of trash arrive each day at a recycling facility that is rebuilt on site each summer, where people in hazmat suits bend over conveyor belts.

LUKE HOWELL: All collected waste is sorted manually on a conveyor belt collection line.

FRAYER: Luke Howell is Glastonbury’s sustainability and green initiatives manager. His job is to prepare the site for the return of its full-time residents, a herd of dairy cows, in a week.

HOWELL: Yeah, sometimes earlier. The festival will obviously end on Sunday night and as people leave the campsites throughout Monday. And I’ll be picking up all the little random pieces of broken plastic, you know, or the wrapper or, like, a cigarette butt. And then we have a big magnet on the back of a tractor, which will go through and collect all the metals.

FRAYER: To remove any misplaced tent stakes that may be left behind. Today, most of the people who do this work are actually volunteers…

SCARLETT LAKE: I’m 27. I’m a scientist in real life, but here I clean toilets.

FRAYER: …People like Scarlett Lake, a geneticist by day, who does the dirty work here in exchange for a free ticket to the festival. She’s joined by Rachel Smith from the charity WaterAid.

RACHEL SMITH: We’ll see some scenes, you know?

FRAYER: I’m not going to ask.

SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, we have strong stomachs, right?

FRAYER: These are Glastonbury’s iconic long-drop toilets, which are vacuumed by tankers multiple times a day. As well as promoting itself as sustainable, the festival also ensures access for all, including children and people with special needs. There are quiet areas for neurodivergent people and wheelchair ramps for people like Karen Lamb.

KAREN LAMB: Well, I have multiple sclerosis, so I can’t walk very far.

FRAYER: She travels around the 1,100-plus-acre festival on a mobility scooter.

LAMB: These are the big off-roaders.

FRAYER: The tires are like…

LAMB: Yes.

FRAYER: …A kind of mud, all-terrain…

LAMB: And it’s really good because it keeps me going. I couldn’t do this without it, so…

FRAYER: She also has battery-powered flashing lights braided into her hair.

LAMB: It comes in handy later on when it’s dark and you’re trying to push through the crowd to have something on your head that lights up so people can see you. Otherwise I end up knocking people over (laughs).

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FRAYER: At the moment it’s actually one of the biggest towns in southern England, but it will return to being a sleepy farm in a few days.

Lauren Frayer, NPR News, in Glastonbury, southwest England.

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