Innovate UK Grant | Comp-A-Tent

The Design Foundations Innovate UK project’s aim was to:

• develop new products/services that used existing infrastructure to stop tent abandonment at festivals;

• reduce the environmental and economic costs to festivals and

• spread responsibility across manufacturers, festival owners, waste companies and consumers.

For all parties involved, this project represented a radical departure from trying to directly influence consumer behaviour, to embracing a broader circular economy model, spreading responsibility over a number of stakeholders and encouraging a small change in the behaviour of each.

Outcomes

An estimated 2-3 years of current development was reduced to a 6-9 month project. New ideas for products/services were developed through interacting directly with festival stakeholders in workshops.

These included:

• Tent collection + return model - “Pick Up a Pop Up” - tackling the tent problem)

• A minimum welfare pack (tackling the risk of weather on customer experience)

• “Eco-ranger” clubs (promoting, incentivising and tracking good behaviour of the festival goers)

Through analysis with stakeholders it was also highlighted the unrealistic hopes of launching a purely compostable tent in the near future. The potential routes for a new tent with a collection/return model were reduced to use existing tents, recycled PET plastic tents, polythene plastic and compostable plastic tents.

The project underspent by £2719.14, which represented 4% under original budget, and ran an additional month over the original 9-month project timeline.