Waste Audit | Boomtown Festival

In 2018, Boomtown Fair hired Comp-A-Tent, the festival-waste reduction consultancy to:

• Understand the campsite behaviours and habits of Boomtown’s festival goers

• Quantify the types of waste left behind at the festival

• Identify opportunities to reduce the associated problems of campsite waste

As Lead Researcher, I defined the scope and topics of investigation, generated the methodologies, lead a team of on-site researchers and analysed the findings to deliver a report and make recommendations to tackle the issues.

Key Findings

• 94% of people stayed in the standard campsite

• 40% of tents were abandoned in 2018, an estimated 12,600 tents

• Over 20% of these abandoned tents can be sourced to 2 retailers

• 34% of festival goers report to having left a tent at a festival

• The typical abandoned tent is 2-man tent, worth £12-£20

Recommendations

Hire Equipment, via Boomtown Site, at Budget price => Pick-Up A Pop-Up Business Model Trial in 2019

The following year, Comp-A-Tent was invited back to run such a Hire-Buy model, with buy-in from the Sustainability team. The service was advertised and promoted by Boomtown as part of their offering and was met with limited success. It matched sales of the pre-pitched campsites, and saw a return rate of 67%. (This ran the same horrific weekend in which many festivals were postponed!)

Through partnership with Camplight, the tents were also then cleaned and used as part of Camplight’s pre-tent hire stock.

Weave an Environmental Narrative => Chapter 11 — A RADICAL CITY (2019)

In 2019 the festival returned with such an environment narrative, foreshadowing real-world environmental catastrophe and economic collapse.