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The festivals and outdoor events sector faces a significant sustainability challenge. Though they vary in size and location, such events effectively create human settlements with all the associated transport, waste, water and sanitation infrastructure needed to accommodate thousands of people for a day or a weekend.
However, the public-facing nature of the sector means it has a unique role in shifting attitudes and behaviour, and
can provide a testbed for innovative sustainability solutions.
As climate minister Kerry McCarthy told the A Greener Future (AGF) annual conference in February: “It’s not just about what you can do to reduce your own emissions, it’s the platform that you have to influence others. You have a much louder voice than many sectors that aren’t quite as exciting or as much a part of people’s lives.”
Progress is being made. AGF has been assessing festival impacts worldwide for 19 years. It publishes an annual report outlining progress, innovation and areas for improvement within the sector. In 2024, it found that of 40 festivals assessed across 16 countries, more were offering fully vegetarian or vegan meals (20% compared with 8% in 2023), and had boosted recycling rates to 49%, compared with 46% in 2023 and 38% in 2022, with single-use plastics now banned at 70% of events assessed.
AGF CEO Claire O’Neill acknowledged that the festivals it assessed were generally more environmentally aware and active than the average, as they are either working with AGF or have achieved its certification. “Nevertheless,” she said, “these results are promising, showing a trend towards decarbonisation and waste reduction.
In particular, we are happy to see more festivals going plant-based, as this is one of the single most important changes events can make to protect nature and tackle climate change, and costs nothing.”
Audience transport is the biggest source of emissions, representing 35-94% of an event’s total, depending on location and length of event – even a small number of people flying will result in large emission shares.
Transporting event infrastructure to and from events, as well as equipment needed by individual acts, is a major source of emissions, at an average of 13% of an event’s total, according to AGF’s data.
Richard Burnett, managing director of trucking company KB Event, has been using hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as a fuel for a while. He believes events in the corporate sector are making the change more quickly than those in the music business, which are put off by costs. While he wants to move towards using electric trucks, he thinks the main barriers to this are costs, infrastructure, skills, availability and performance of the vehicles. Electric trucks cost around £400,000, compared with £150,000 for a standard HGV designed to pull trailers.
The sector also faces the challenge of travelling long distances in a very short space of time. He recalls a client asking if he could use an electric truck to transport equipment from the UK to Barcelona. “We did all the mapping, looked at the charging infrastructure and the range of the truck. The technology will get there, but at the moment, it has not moved on sufficiently fast enough.” Burnett believes that the government needs to do more to support the trucking sector to make changes more quickly.
The issue of water and sanitation is becoming urgent for festivals. Most toilets at festivals are chemical portaloos, with waste removed daily by tankers. Some festivals use compost toilets to reduce waste transportation, but this stood at just 15% of festivals assessed by AGF in 2024. Some 30% are connected to the mains for some or all of their wastewater.
According to Jacob Tompkins, chief technology officer of The Water Retail Company, water companies do not have sufficient sewerage capacity locally to handle very large events. “When you take the waste away in tankers, it goes to a sewage treatment works which is already over capacity, and then the tankers have to drive further and further,” he told the AGF’s conference.
Jane Healy manages water and sanitation at the Glastonbury Festival, and oversees 6,500 toilets, the contents of which are removed by Wessex Water using around 350 water tankers over five days. “The situation is getting worse for Glastonbury – the local treatment works are at capacity, so we have to go further afield. That’s more miles on the road by big tankers, which is undermining what I’m trying to achieve,” she says.
Similarly, although water consumption at festivals is significantly lower than household use – at an average of 20 litres per person per day for festivals involving camping, compared with an EU household average of around 140 litres – large events can cause problems, such as low pressure in the tap for residents nearby.
The issue of water capacity is not well understood, Tompkins says. For example, in its plan for 2025-2030, Anglian Water has said that it cannot provide any new water supply. “If you’ve got an event there, there will not be any water.”
To reduce the amount of transported waste, Healy uses compost loos, with 800 on site at Glastonbury. She is also looking at options for dealing with urine – for example, by turning it into fertiliser. Healy believes that festivals can be great testing-grounds for new technologies. This year at Boomtown, which she also manages, water technology company MTD will provide units that transform wastewater into purified water on site. Theoretically, the treated water could be repurposed, for example for showers – although not this year. “It can only deal with 200 cubic metres a day, which isn’t going to solve my issue, but it’s an exciting start,” she says.
Tompkins points to a raft of companies developing technologies that can remove nitrates and phosphates from wastewater and then sell them. He firmly believes that festivals could be an interesting testbed for new technologies, and in return be seen as champions of water and wastewater innovation, rather than a burden on the local area.
Few festivals have given much thought to biodiversity impacts. However, organisers of the We Love Green festival in the Bois de Vincennes near Paris have begun a three-year analysis of their impact on nature, including that of noise and light pollution, and the presence of large numbers of people.
In 2024, the team installed ultrasonic sensors on bird and bat nesting boxes to monitor nest-building and brooding periods, and the number of eggs and fledglings per nest. It will also assess impacts on soil. This arrangement is being repeated in a similar area with no festival to compare findings.
With many trees planted just 20 years ago, the species that live in this urban wood are already partly adapted to human presence and disturbance, says Hortense Serret, an ecologist and founder of the consultancy Nabi Ecology, which is working with the festival on the initiative.
Data from the first year of analysis showed little impact on the birds, with a chick mortality rate of 5%, similar to that in other parks. Bat activity was found to take place later at night during the festival, indicating that they were avoiding the lights and noise. However, the festival had less impact than horse racing at the park, she says. Human activity and bad weather at the festival meant the soil was very disturbed, leading to lower plant diversity immediately after the event. However, this returned very quickly.
This kind of study can lead to ‘fights and fears’ with stakeholders. “You need people to come to the table and have a real conversation … to discuss the good and bad impacts of the festival and find solutions together,” Serret adds.
Sustainability leaders in the live music sector have worked to create a concept show to prove that all aspects of an event can be greened. In August 2024, trip-hop band Massive Attack headlined at Act 1.5, designed to demonstrate the potential for large shows to become low-carbon.
The band had already collaborated with climate scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and commissioned a roadmap for decarbonisation of the live music sector.
Held in Bristol with an audience of 32,000, Act 1.5 put many of the roadmap’s recommendations into practice. The main stage was powered by renewable energy, with Grid Faeries and Ecotricity providing a 1 megawatt battery, to avoid the use of diesel generator backup; catering was meat-free site-wide; and all touring and production vehicles were electric or fuelled by verified 100% waste product HVO fuel.
Audience travel was reduced via a localised pre-sale period to encourage attendance by people nearby and the provision of free post-show electric shuttles to the main rail hubs. The artists travelled by public transport, and reduced the amount of equipment needed to be taken by road.
The Tyndall Centre’s analysis of the show’s impacts against the roadmap, compared with a hypothetical show where environmental measures are not prioritised, found a 72% reduction in emissions from artist and crew travel, and a 90% fall in greenhouse gas emissions associated with food.
Emissions connected to on-site electricity were at least 81% lower than the counterfactual show, which was assumed to run on diesel generators.
The Tyndall Centre believes collaboration was central to the show’s success – especially the work with the train industry on audience travel, and the power and battery technology firms for festival power.
Music producer Jamal Chalabi thinks that the main barrier to making sustainability mainstream is a mindset that it is still optional. “It has to be part of every single conversation. People question the cost, but if we don’t act, how much more will it cost?”
Catherine Early is a freelance journalist
IEMA CEO Sarah Mukherjee MBE will be at Glastonbury’s original solar-powered venue, Croissant Neuf, speaking at the Outrage + Optimism LIVE event. She will discuss green skills and careers alongside Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, with Matthew Phillips from Global Optimism hosting. For more information, visit www.bit.ly/4jtJnZw
