The festival's over... someone fetch a dustpan and brush

[Cupe]

Sea of rubbish left behind by 90,000 music fans at Reading Festival

It looks like the aftermath of a campsite tornado, or perhaps the first stages of a landfill site.

But this was the scene the morning after the night before at Reading Festival, shortly after everyone had gone home.

The music stopped... the party finished... and a 90,000-strong exodus from the hugely popular music event began.

It’s just that many festival-goers appear to have left a few things behind when they went.

Result: a massive sea of beer cans, cigarette butts, half-eaten food, discarded packaging, lost or unwanted belongings, grubby clothes, wellies, sleeping bags and abandoned tents.

Especially tents.

‘Camping gear is so cheap these days that people seem to make it part of their festival package budget, and don’t bother to take it with them when they leave,’ a festival insider said.

‘If eight people are crammed into one tent it’s only going to cost them a few quid each. We do everything we can to encourage people to take their stuff with them when they leave but it’s a question of social responsibility. At the end of the day it’s down to the individual.’

A huge clear-up operation began within hours of the annual Bank Holiday event closing on Monday. Despite a ‘Love Your Tent’ campaign imploring people to pack up and remove their camping gear, thousands clearly didn’t.

Last year more than 20 tons of re-useable equipment was salvaged - and this year the figure is expected to be even higher. Some will be offered to local charities but damaged or unplaced equipment will be destined for landfill sites.

Unopened cans of food, some of which was donated at designated drop-off points around the campsite, will be recovered and distributed.

Much of the rubbish, however, is precisely that.

Meanwhile the spectacular sea of camping trash, just yards from upmarket homes on the opposite bank of the Thames at Caversham, is expected to take up to two weeks for festival organisers to clear completely.

Tractors towing magnets are used to collect metal tent pegs and other potentially dangerous metal objects, and volunteers will work with specialised rubbish-clearance teams eventually to return the field to its original state.

Lack of rain over the weekend means the task will be significantly easier. High temperatures mean the garbage will be significantly smellier.

Advertising company trainee Louise Miller, 17, took a day off work to travel from her home in mid-Wales to attend the festival with two friends.

‘We bought a stupid looking two-berth pop-up tent from Argos and we all squashed up inside,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘We never intended to abandon it but although it popped up really easily, it was impossible to get it to fit back in the bag properly. Everyone else was leaving their stuff behind so we did too.

'I feel really bad now about dumping it, but I promise we did put all our other stuff in the recycle bags, and we were careful not to leave any litter.’

Source: dailymail.co.uk

[OxyKon]

holy shit

[Cupe]

I would so raid that for all the treasures

[Tomy]

holy mother of nature thats a shit load of rubbish

[yizzle]

sell all camping gear you pick up outside of backpackers cheap.

#winning

[Cee]

[BeatLeSS]

Fucking grots. Can safely say I haven't seen anything like this yet in the outdoor festivals I've been to. I've always loaded up more trash than made to take out of the site too.

[yizzle]

I've always loaded up more trash than made to take out of the site too.

ditto

[Cupe]

You would find so many dope treasures

I would get baked as hell for like a week straight scrounging through shit

[AlexJ]

This is pretty much what splendour looked like after the festival. we one of the last groups to leave and only like 1 in 5 tents left the site. there was just shit everywhere