Glastonbury Festival reducing environmental impact

Perhaps the event that is most associated with the vagaries of the weather is the Glastonbury Festival, due to take place this year on the last weekend of June.

Most of us are familiar with scenes from Glastonbury; the mudbath created after the inevitable heavy rain, the queues for the toilets, the hordes of tents and the rubbish left behind after everyone has gone home.

This year, the Glastonbury organisers have launched the "Love the Farm '“ Leave no Trace" campaign, which aims to tackle many of the environmentally negative aspects of the festival.

The campaign covers some of the obvious environmental impacts such as recycling as much of the rubbish left behind as possible and encouraging people to travel to the event in alternative means of transport to the car.

It is some of the less obvious ideas that interest me, however, including handing out one million tentpegs made from biodegradable material.

It seems that many thousands of metal tent pegs are left behind in the ground each year.

These are time-consuming to remove and, if left, can cause injury to grazing cows.

Perhaps not surprisingly (for a farm), the organisers are also using more biofuels to power the generators used for running the event.

Some of the energy used is also harnessed from the sun and wind.

In order to encourage everyone to take part in these initiatives, 100 "green police" wearing comic costumes will be on hand to remind people of their responsibilities with a friendly approach.

Glastonbury is not the only music festival to focus heavily on their environmental impact, most other large festivals elsewhere in the country have also introduced similar policies.

However, as the largest, it is gratifying to see that Glastonbury leads the way for environmental management.

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