The Environmental Impact of Music Festivals - TENTS

Tens of thousands of tents are discarded at festivals - and I know why

  By Karen Luckhurst, June 2014                                                                                                                                                The Guardian

"Oh to have been a tent manufacturer with a crystal ball in the 1970s.

Back then, camping was in decline, due in part to holidays in the sun becoming cheaper and more available.

But then the sun came out for the likes of Vango et al – not literally, of course, you understand. The rise and rise of the great British music festival over the last couple of decades has made owning a tent a pre-requisite for any under-30. Meanwhile, camping came back into fashion for the over-30s, who rediscovered a cheap and delightful way to holiday with the kids.

Later this month Worthy Farm, near Glastonbury, will host 150,000 revellers, staff and performers. Latitude, in July, will entertain around 35,000: the Isle of Wight this weekend will play host to about 55,000; that's an awful lot of party-goers and tents – and there are many more festivals happening all over the UK this summer.

Each year, tonnes of rubbish are left at festival sites. A figure that includes thousands upon thousands of tents. In one year alone at Glastonbury, 20,000 tents were abandoned, according to Rob Kearle, the festival’s head of refuse and recycling. In an interview with recycling website, Resource, Kearle says the festival tries to recycle what tents it can, however, many still end up in landfill. “Last year, a local woman collected about 1,000 to use to make clothes, and groups like the Boy Scouts and Air Cadets also get to pick through the leftovers,” says Kearle.

Kearle lays the blame for this figure at a throw-away mentality and a change in the demographic of festival-goers from the original green-minded hippies. However, I personally would like to add another reason, which is that the damn things are so difficult to pack up.

I often go away with the kids on my own, and I have noticed over the years that quite a lot of mums do the same thing. I have just enjoyed a couple of nights on the south Devon coast with my daughter. Nearby a mum was camping with her two young children in one of those pop-up tents beloved of festival-goers.

I was interested to witness her attempts to pack up with the hindrance of her toddler and a baby who had crawled off to chew on some grass. She worked hard and long to get the tent to fold up – trying this way, then that, bending it into contortions it was never designed to be bent into.

Eventually she managed to fold it into the required circle, but just then the baby headed off for pastures new – literally. Poor mum looked from the folded tent in her arms to the disappearing baby and with an anguished howl let it go, whereupon it promptly pinged back into shape.

It was at this point that I felt I should offer my services. It is possible you have been thinking that I should have done this earlier. However, it was 7am and I was in my jim-jams reading a Buddhism book on the benefits of loving humanity and living in the present moment. Slowly, it occurred to me the moment had come to show my love for this despairing human.

Mum grabbed baby and toddler and forcefully strapped them into the car, where they screamed in indignation. Then we both set to and wrestled with the tent for a long time, hampered by mum's stress levels and my concern that the dubious elasticity of my pyjamas would not long survive this dance around a campsite with a pop-up tent.

Once tamed it took as long to stuff the billowing folds of nylon into its absurdly snug-fitting bag. "I'll have to do it again back home," said mum sadly once it was in the boot of her car. "It's wet on the bottom." I gazed at her with empathy; her children were still screaming, she looked completely done in, a three-hour drive to the Midlands lay ahead of her and it was not yet 8am.

I vowed not to repeat the same procedure when I left and stuffed our tent in the back of the car to be dealt with once home. I have unsuccessfully tried seven times since to fold it so it goes back into the bag from whence it came.

It appears to me that tent manufacturers seem to me to be overly focused on compact and lightweight tents that can be transported and put up easily but less concerned with how they get put away. Why, for instance, do the sleeves they come in have to be quite so tight fitting?

They seem to be unaware that people may not be folding up tents in ideal conditions – that it might be windy and wet for instance, or a woman might be camping on her own with small children, or a hapless and hungover teenager could be trying to deal with a sodden, mud-encrusted mass of nylon and bendy poles.

I'm not up to the maths, but if 20,000 tents were left at Glastonbury in one year – what is the total for all the festivals in the UK every summer?

Call me a cynic, but replacement tents every festival season must be big business.

Oh, for that crystal ball."

(from https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/she-said/2014/jun/13/tens-of-thousands-of-tents-are-discarded-at-festivals-and-i-know-why)

"4 new measures would tighten regulation of massive hog confinements"

"4 new measures would tighten regulation of massive hog confinements"
By David Jackson & Gary Marsh, March 2017

As pork producers exploit weak laws to build and expand large hog confinements across rural Illinois, neighboring farmers have complained their rights are being trampled while waste spills poison local streams and sickening gases ruin families' lives and property values.

But after years of frustration and legislative inaction, lawmakers on Tuesday announced four new bills that would tighten Illinois' lax environmental protections and give local citizens more input in the permitting process, as well as standing to challenge the massive facilities in court.

The bills, proposed in response to the Tribune's August investigation, "The Price of Pork," would represent the first significant reforms to Illinois' 1996 Livestock Management Facilities Act, which has been criticized for failing to keep pace with the dramatic growth of swine confinements. Holding thousands of pigs and sometimes producing millions of gallons of manure annually, the operations now account for more than 90 percent of Illinois' $1.5 billion in annual hog sales.

"What is going on in our rural communities and to many of our farmers and farm families is wrong and unjust and we can do better than this for them," Fulton County farmer Craig Porter said Tuesday at a Springfield news conference held by Democratic state Sen. David Koehler of Peoria, a sponsor of two of the bills.

Porter described his frustrating efforts to halt a proposed 20,000-head hog operation near his homestead — a facility planned by a Wall Street-traded real estate investment trust and an affiliate of leading pork producer Professional Swine Management.

"Repairing the lax rules, ambiguous siting criteria and other large loopholes in the (Illinois law) should have been done years ago to protect family farmers and residents," he said.

Flanked by several farm families from across Illinois, Koehler said he and other lawmakers modeled the new bills on existing laws in nearby livestock-producing states such as Iowa, Indiana and Wisconsin. "This is a common-sense approach. This is not radical," Koehler said.

One bill would require all confinements to register with the state Environmental Protection Agency. Koehler said he was shocked to learn that state officials have no idea how many large hog confinements are operating in the state, or where many of them are located — a loophole that makes it nearly impossible to monitor and regulate the factorylike operations.

"That is something I found alarming. We're going to try and correct that," Koehler said. "We think the state of Illinois needs to have a record of who's doing business in this state. That's not unreasonable. People in rural areas need to know what's really going on in their communities."

A second bill would close a frequently used loophole in Illinois law that allows new confinements to be constructed without a permit when they can be deemed an expansion of previous livestock operations.

The third would require that facilities file waste management plans before they are constructed, and publicly disclose these plans if county officials and local residents request hearings on the proposed operations. Currently in Illinois, any facility housing up to 12,499 grown pigs can begin operations without disclosing that kind of information. The waste plans concern nearby farmers because the facilities apply stored manure to nearby cropland as fertilizer, and overapplication can lead to toxic runoff and devastate the surrounding environment.

And the final bill would give neighbors standing to challenge the Agriculture Department in court if they think mistakes were made in approving a construction permit. Citizens currently have no recourse once the permit is approved, even if they believe the department's decision was flawed. The bill also would double the amount of time local residents have to request an informational hearing and object to a proposed confinement. Such hearings are held if a local county board requests one or if at least 75 citizens petition. But many farmers and small-town residents told the Tribune they felt the meetings were meaningless and their concerns were ignored or ridiculed.

Koehler said of the state's booming livestock industry: "We're seeing an increase in activity and an increase in frustration."

Both the Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Pork Producers Association declined to comment Tuesday on the four proposed bills, saying they have not reviewed the details of the legislation.

The two organizations carry significant political weight in Springfield and in 2014 shot down a similar, ambitious effort to overhaul the livestock act. They, along with other agriculture groups, argue that large livestock confinements provide jobs in rural counties as well as a market for local grain farmers, and help hold down the market price of the most widely consumed meat in the world.

The Tribune series sparked calls for reform from lawmakers including U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin as well as local efforts to halt or slow the construction of new facilities. The series found that hog waste spills accounted for nearly half of the 1 million fish killed in Illinois water pollution incidents from 2005 to 2014 and impaired 67 miles of rivers and waterways during that time.

Neighboring farmers also said their lives and property values were ruined by noxious gases from the giant confinements. Hog waste releases hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, which can cause respiratory illness when mixed with airborne animal dander and fecal dust, public health studies have found.

"Small-town America here in Illinois along with rural families and businesses are being sold out due to the lack of adequate laws for industrial animal confinement operations," said Heidi Foil, whose home and animal care business are located roughly 2 miles from a pair of proposed 20,000-hog confinements in Vermilion County. Foil said at the news conference that she also fears that waste released from the underground storage pits will ruin a stream that runs through her property.

She said of Illinois: "We've become a lax and cheap place for mass numbers of these factory farms to set up shop."

Matt Howe, an eighth-generation grain and livestock farmer, said he resigned from the Fulton County Farm Bureau's board of directors earlier this year to protest the group's apparent support of a proposed 20,000-head hog confinement about 3,000 feet from his farm and home.

"The land that we use is not just a tool to pad portfolios," Howe said. "It's a living, breathing thing rooted in my community."

After the news conference, Jennifer Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, an advocacy group, said Koehler is working with a coalition of rural legislators to get the agricultural interests to negotiate.

She called the bills a solid first step. "There's more we'd like to do, but these are reforms we want to see enacted," Walling said.

(originally posted by Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/pork/ct-pork-legislation-met-20170328-story.html)