Efforts to make the world’s largest music festival sustainable affect everything from litter pickup to wheelchair access and child safety. Is it possible for 200,000+ campers to “leave no trace?”
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, host:
A year after Woodstock was held in the US, a British farmer decided to do something similar and invited rock stars to his family farm. It was south-west England in 1970. And now 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. Even now, the five-day festival somehow manages to live up to its founder’s motto of leaving no trace on the earth. NPR’s Lauren Frayer takes a look at how.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: It feels like every inch of grass has been taken over by a sea of colorful tents. There are hundreds of thousands of people camping here. The area is filled with these massive stages, several stories high. There is also a pop-up hotel with a swimming pool installed in it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English spoken).
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FRAYER: No plastic or glass allowed here. Everything is biodegradable and compostable. But there are still many things left behind by the hundreds of thousands of campers. And that goes to Atholl Lawson and his team.
ATHOLL LAWSON: They’re all volunteers. They pass like a swarm of locusts.
FRAYER: He commands an army of garbage collectors, deployed day and night, to empty 15,000 garbage cans.
LAW: Paper cups, white bags, cans go. We take the bags.
FRAYER: Oh, it’s color-coded.
LAWSON: Yeah, so…
FRAYER: And they have little abductors and…
LAWSON: Yeah, little heist tools, bag loads. We’ve got it down to a fine art now, so…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Copy that.
FRAYER: About 100 dump trucks a day arrive at a recycling facility that’s rebuilt on site every summer, where men in hazmat suits bend over conveyor belts.
LUKE HOWELL: All the waste that is collected is being sorted by hand on a conveyor belt collection line.
FRAYER: Luke Howell is Glastonbury’s manager of sustainability and green initiatives. His job is to prepare the place for the return of his full-time residents, a herd of dairy cows, within a week.
HOWELL: Yes, sometimes faster. The festival will end, of course, on Sunday night, and as people leave the campsites on Monday. And I’ll take any random broken pieces of plastic, you know, or wrappers or, like, a cigarette butt. And then we have a big magnet on the back of a tractor, and it will go through and pick up any metal.
FRAYER: To retrieve any stray tent pegs that may be left behind. Now, 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’s doing some of the dirtiest work here in exchange for a free festival ticket. She is joined by Rachel Smith from the charity WaterAid.
RACHEL SMITH: We’re going to see some scenes, you know?
FRAYER: I won’t ask.
SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, we have strong stomachs, right?
FRAYER: These are the famous Glastonbury toilets with long spouts that are sucked up by tanker trucks many times a day. In addition to being billed as sustainable, the festival also guarantees accessibility for everyone, 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 far at all.
FRAYER: She navigates the more than 1,100-acre festival on a mobility scooter.
LAMB: They are the big off-roaders.
FRAYER: Tires are like…
LAMB: Yes.
FRAYER: …Kind of clay, versatile…
LAMB: And it’s really good because it attracts me. I couldn’t do this without him, so…
FRAYER: She also has battery-operated flashing lights woven through her hair.
LAMB: It comes to work later when it’s dark and you’re trying to make your way through the crowds to have something on your head that lights up so people can see you. Otherwise, I end up running people over (laughter).
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FRAYER: Right now, this is actually one of the biggest cities in southern England, but it’s going to turn into a sleepy farm in just a few days.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, in Glastonbury, southwest England.
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