Warmer, sunnier days just around the corner, and with them will come the return of a beloved summer pastime: packing up the tent and heading to one of the UK’s dozens of music and cultural festivals.
Millions of Brits attend music festivals each year, which makes sense, given that the UK is home to some of the world’s best. And while we here at Meetini share a love of festival season, we’re also highly aware of the negative impacts that festivals have traditionally had on the environment.
According to a report by the UK government’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, UK festivals “generate 25,800 tonnes of waste, 22,876 tonnes of CO2 and use 185 million litres of water annually”. On average, the report notes, festival attendees create 2kg of waste per day, which is almost double the amount produced by people going about their everyday lives at home. That amounts to about 23,500 tonnes of waste each year, including the thousands of tents that festival-goers leave behind. That is to say nothing of the fuel used to transport attendees and performers to festivals, and the many other factors that contribute to festival emissions.
Despite pledges by many vendors and organisers to improve sustainability, festival-related carbon emissions were at their worst in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, having doubled over the five previous years due to an increase in the number of attendees.
Clearly, organisers, vendors and attendees haven’t been doing enough to make UK festivals more Earth-friendly, and climate change experts are adamant that meaningful change should involve completely re-thinking how to manage festivals.
Ways Meetini is Making UK Festivals More Sustainable
One major aspect that hosts and vendors are re-thinking is the materials they use to distribute food and drink at festivals. Many festivals have already banned single-use plastic, including Glastonbury, which prohibits the sale of plastic bottles.
But what about the waste that vendors themselves produce? Meetini is helping festival vendors curb their own waste with our range of ethical and organic spirits, which we sell in refillable 200L barrels and 50L kegs. This eliminates the use (and waste) of glass bottles, which – though endlessly recyclable – often end up in the trash, and which still uses a lot of energy to produce and recycle.
By using our spirits, vendors further reduce the carbon footprint of their beverages thanks to our sustainable transportation and storage methods.
As vendors ourselves, we’re well aware of the many ways that catering an event can produce unnecessary waste and contribute to carbon emissions. For our cocktail catering service, achieving peak sustainability has meant exclusively using electric cargo bicycles to transport and sell our cocktails, using compostable or edible cups and wheat straws, making ingredients in-house wherever possible.
As far as making UK festivals truly sustainable goes, serving zero-waste cocktails is a drop in the ocean. Enough small changes can, however, lead to huge progress – and with an increasing number of festivals getting on board with sustainability initiatives, we’re optimistic about the direction in which things are heading!