Glastonbury 2019: Festival to ban sale of single-use plastic bottles for first time
‘It's paramount for our planet that we all reduce our plastic consumption’
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Louise Thomas
Editor
Glastonbury is putting an end to single-use plastic bottles being sold at the music festival for the first time.
The festival, which was first inaugurated in 1970, is taking place this summer from Wednesday 26 June until Sunday 30 June.
This year, the organisers have decided to take a stand against the detrimental impact of plastic pollution.
"With more than one million plastic bottles sold at Glastonbury in 2017, we feel that stopping their sale is the only way forward," a statement on the musical festival's website reads.
According to the announcement, plastic bottles will also not be supplied backstage, in dressing rooms or to people working in production or catering.
Glastonbury Festival organiser Emily Eavis has expressed her pride in the festival's new environmental initiative.
"It's paramount for our planet that we all reduce our plastic consumption and I'm thrilled that, together, we'll be able to prevent over a million single-use plastic bottles from being used at this year's festival," she says.
"I really hope that everyone - from ticket-holder to headliner - will leave Worthy Farm this year knowing that even small, everyday changes can make a real difference. It's now or never."
While festival-goers won't be able to buy single-use plastic bottles on the Somerset site, they will still be able to bring their own.
The festival's organisers are encouraging those attending the five-day event to bring reusable bottles and to use the taps placed around the site to refill them with water, as opposed to throwing them away.
All the bars on the site will provide free drinking water, and the number of kiosks being run by charity WaterAid will triple for this year's event.
Canned soft drinks and canned Life Water, a British natural spring water brand, will still be available for festival attendees to purchase.
In 2014, Glastonbury encouraged festival-goers to reduce the quantity of plastic bottles used at the festival by offering them the opportunity to buy £10 stainless steel, refillable bottles, created in collaboration with charities WaterAid and Raw Foundation.
Two years later, the festival introduced its "Love The Farm, Leave No Trace" initiative, to encourage attendees to collect their litter and recycle where possible.
In December 2018, education secretary Damian Hinds urged schools to go single-use plastic free by 2022.
The Conservative MP stated that the reduction of plastic pollution is an "important and timely issue which has the captured the interest and the imagination of everyone in society".
For all the latest news on the 2019 Glastonbury Festival, click here.
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