campaign to make the Kingsbridge Food & Music Festival as plastic-free as possible. “Single-use plastic is our biggest challenge in terms of making any festival more sustainable because it is so cheap, light and readily available – plus, it’s a habit; food waste comes a close second,” explains Amanda. “Look for reusables – stainless steel is ideal – but after that, compostable single-use items are probably more realistic for large events.” It’s a big ask to scale up these values to festival level, but Amanda believes it’s within our reach: “We’ve had lots of positive feedback about our compostable plastic cups going to a local farm for composting – people are really happy if they can go out and have a good time without feeling guilt for the waste they’re creating.”

Sustainability isn’t an afterthought. It’s key for organisers to integrate any sustainability ethos into the initial planning and design stages, and Amanda did manage to persuade most of the food and drink stallholders to comply before signing up to the festival, which has a footfall of 5,000 visitors. “But many businesses are so used to looking at costs they are reluctant to spend a couple of pennies more per unit. In our case, all the food and drink stallholders cooperated by using only paper, cardboard, wood or compostable plastic, but the main pub on the town square only ‘dabbled’ in our compostable plastic cups scheme – they sell hundreds of thousands of drinks over the weekend and ran out of compostable cups just a couple of hours into our three-day-long event, then used single-use plastic for the rest of the weekend, causing extra hassle in separating their cups from the compostable ones, which would be disposed of differently. It was disappointing that they were reluctant to step back to see the bigger picture, but we hope to persuade them to fully get on board next year.” Most people genuinely want to do the right thing – it is good for their business, after all, and Amanda makes it easy for them, providing details of local suppliers and a specially negotiated discount.

Plastic drinks bottles are probably the biggest culprit – almost half a trillion (500,000,000,000) plastic bottles will be used in 2017 alone. But Bristol-based social enterprise City to Sea is tackling this head on with its Refill campaign, promoting restaurants and shops who are happy to offer free tap water. This is something Amanda has worked hard to establish in her local area: “We love the simplicity of City to Sea’s Refill app – how it aims to connect people with taps to people that need water, using technology to make it easier, and breaking down the typical British embarrassment to ask for something for free! We now have around 15 participating shops, bars and cafés in Kingsbridge signed up to the Refill app and we’re working on spreading the word further.”

Natalie Fee, founder of the community-interest company City to Sea, set up Refill in 2015 in Bristol. This grassroots, volunteer-led water bottle refill programme now has more than 700 refill points

Foodies at festivals across the West Country have the power to make a huge impact when it comes to food waste and single-use plastics, as Anna Turns finds out.

Now, it’s all well and good being as eco-conscious as we possibly can at home or in the office, but what happens when we’re out and about en masse in public spaces? At food, music and camping festivals around

the country, people are in relaxed mode, convenience is key and saving the planet may well end up lower on the agenda. But some environmental champions and event organisers in the West Country are going the extra mile to make it quick, easy and above all fun to be as waste-free as possible.

Food and drink always features heavily for festival goers, whether they bring their own or buy from street stalls. So just imagine how many thousands of plastic knives and forks, cups and bottles are used or how many tonnes of food waste are thrown into landfill. Foodies across the country are beginning to take note of the media frenzy currently surrounding the plastic pollution scandal, and some of our favourite regional food festivals are at the forefront of this campaign to refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle.

In June this year, sustainability expert and founder of Less Plastic, Amanda Keetley, spearheaded a

City to Sea’s water bars are hugely popular at festivals

Encouraging more people to buy and bring a stainless steel bottle is a great way to reduce numbers of single-use plastic bottles

Reducing single-use plastic was a key aim for Kingsbridge Food and Music Festival this summer

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Compostable cups at the Heron Valley stand at Kingsbridge Food and Music Festival

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Boardmaster’s Green Team helped keep plastic litter to a minimum

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Green ASBO stickers were a new type of deterrent on tents belonging to messy campers at Boardmasters this summer

Dartmouth Food Festival aims to be single-use plastic-free for the first time this October

almost 150,000 people to Newquay over the course of five days. This year, Surfers Against Sewage ran a series of beach clean ups, ocean plastic workshops and installations, plus 10,000 reusable refillable bottles were available to buy plus refill stations were installed across the site, eliminating thousands of single-use plastic bottles from the festival site.

Hugo Tagholm, Chief Executive at Surfers Against Sewage, based in St Agnes, believes that when it comes to creating change, it’s important that people feel empowered: “We always try to give people bite-sized chunks of information and specific actions, from refillable water bottles through specific Plastic Free Coastlines campaign actions they can engage with MPs on.” He continues: “This year, for the first time at Boardmasters we deployed litter ASBOs to encourage ‘messy campers’ to clean up their act. This coupled nicely with the litter bonds that all campers had, whereby £10 was reimbursed when the campers brought back a full bin bag of litter.”

Even en masse, Hugo feels optimistic that people’s attitudes are changing for the better. “We have made huge leaps and bounds forward in engaging festival goers with plastic pollution and litter issues, and the organisers of Boardmasters are very engaged with this

agenda too. Together with our partners, we’re making some tangible headway.”

Plastic-free options are out there and change is totally within our reach, so at a festival level, the potential to scale up our good intentions is huge. This October, Dartmouth Food Festival is the next event on our calendar to tackle this issue head on, with six cafés and delis initially signed up to the Refill scheme and more than 115 traders signed up to the new plastic-free policy. Let’s hope even more festivals and events across the South West follow suit next year.

GO SINGLE-USE PLASTIC-FREE • Use reusable cloth bags or take a basket so you can say no to

plastic bags.

• Invest in a stainless steel drinks bottle and find a water refill

station (download the Refill app at refill.org.uk ).

• Use reusable or compostable alternatives rather than

polystyrene takeaway containers – or buy food naked if possible.

• Say no to plastic straws or stirrers every time you order a drink.

• Use bulk dispensers rather than sachets of sugar and condiments.

• Recycle what you can – take note of the bins available at festivals

and separate your rubbish accordingly.

• For ideas to reduce your plastic footprint, visit lessplastic.co.uk.

nationwide. But if every Bristolian refilled once a week instead of buying a single-use plastic bottle, the city would reduce its waste plastic bottle consumption by 22.3m a year. Refill is currently also set up in Cornwall, Dorset, Devon, Bath and Bradford-on-Avon, with Brighton, Norwich and Hunstanton launching very soon. This model has been shared beyond the UK border too, with Refill Hamburg now happening.

En masse, it is harder to engage crowds of thousands with behavioural change but Natalie believes the key to success is encouraging people to remember to bring their reusables out with them. “Organisers should build plastic-free alternatives into the preparation and planning of an event. Refillable cups, bottles and food vessels can be included in the ticket price so people have the option to buy a lunchbox or a bottle right from the start or choose to bring their own. Refilling them on site is then discounted, so for example they get £1 off every pint if they bring their own cup. The more it’s mentioned, the more these events are helping to normalise that behaviour for people.” She explains that “the responsibility is very much with festival organisers to build in a reuse culture and incentivise that because generally people are more motivated if they know they’re going to save money.”

Luke Howell, environmental sustainability manager and founder of Hope Solutions, is working closely with the Boardmasters Surf and Music Festival in Newquay, which has big ambitions to reduce its plastic footprint, in association with Surfers Against Sewage. “At Boardmasters, tens of thousands of pints get served and that could be a massive amount of waste being incinerated or going to landfill if not recyclable, so amongst other things we will be looking at alternative cup options for future years,” says Luke, who is based in Shepton Mallet. Every August, this festival attracts

The responsibility is very much with festival organisers to build in a re-use culture and incentivise that because generally people are more motivated if they know they’re going to save money.

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