Summer is almost unimaginable without music festivals, whether you are a young person attending them or a senior citizen bothered by the noise. No, festivals only annoy the grumpy old folks; they also disturb the environment, with the trash left behind by thousands and thousands of more or less unruly visitors, which is not and cannot be sustainable. This is especially important for young Europeans who have overnight transformed into salon leftists who love woke culture, ecology, and want to protect us from climate change, and it seems also from festivals.
And of course, festival organizers have realized this and have truly made every effort to show visitors how to leave no waste behind, and if there is any, how to sort it and prioritize the right things, but there were those who were not particularly satisfied with this.
Various activists, scientists, and eco-influencers went so far this summer as to accuse music festival organizers of nothing less than a lack of transparency in disclosing sustainability data, reports Politico.
From the English Glastonbury to the Belgian Tomorrowland to the Spanish Primavera Sound and even the Hungarian Sziget, festivals this year, more than ever, have publicly and PR-wise skillfully presented the measures they are taking to combat climate change, all with the aim of becoming more sustainable. However, those from the previous paragraph found it neither sufficiently transparent nor clear enough, arguing in a sharpened communication with the festivals that one cannot talk about sustainability while 'hundreds of thousands of people fly across the continent to enjoy music, consumption, and excesses'.
– It is time for music festivals to stop 'showing initiatives' and start actually implementing them – said Dogan Gursoy, a professor at Washington State University and author of a book on the climate impacts of festival tourism, one of those anti-festival chauvinists.
How far the story has gone is best evidenced by the fact that even Frans Timmermans, the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal, got involved in the whole affair. He even defended the festivals, but did not stop the criticism.
– Many festivals emphasize waste reduction as their main climate policy, but if you look at the overall picture of carbon emissions due to travel to festivals, it means that visitors emit up to 11 times more climate pollution than waste itself – these are the words of Kimberly Nicholas, a professor and sustainability scientist at Lund University in Sweden, for Politico.
