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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’

Thursday 28 February 2019 10:32 GMT

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The Arctic Monkeys performing on the main stage at Glastonbury in 2013

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.

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

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1/15Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

A father and son on a makeshift boat made from styrofoam paddle through a garbage filled river as they collect plastic bottles that they can sell in junkshops in Manila. The father and son team earn some three US dollars a day retrieving recyclables from the river.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

A composite image of items found on the shore of the Thames Estuary in Rainham, Kent. Tons of plastic and other waste lines areas along the Thames Estuary shoreline, an important feeding ground for wading birds and other marine wildlife.

Getty Images

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Children collect plastic water bottles among the garbage washed ashore at the Manila Bay. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, at current rates of pollution, there will likely be more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the Thames Estuary. In December 2017 Britain joined the other 193 UN countries and signed up to a resolution to help eliminate marine litter and microplastics in the sea. It is estimated that about eight million metric tons of plastic find their way into the world's oceans every year. Once in the Ocean plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade, all the while breaking down into smaller and smaller 'microplastics,' which can be consumed by marine animals, and find their way into the human food chain.

Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

A dump site in Manila in 2013. The Philippines financial capital banned disposable plastic shopping bags and styrofoam food containers, as part of escalating efforts across the nation's capital to curb rubbish that exacerbates deadly flooding.

AFP/Getty Images

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Children swims in the sea full of garbage in North Jakarta, Indonesia.

Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

An Indian woman holds a jar filled with Yamuna river water polluted with froth and toxic foam to be used for rituals at the river bank in New Delhi, India. The Yamuna River, like all other holy rivers in India, has been massively polluted for decades now. The river that originates in a glacier in the pristine and unpolluted Himalayas, and flows through Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh before merging with the Ganges River in Allahabad, once used to be the lifeline of the Indian capital. Currently, it is no more than a large, open sewer that is choking with industrial and domestic discharge that includes plastic, flowers and debris and has virtually no aquatic life.

EPA

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Plastic waste is washed up on South Troon beach in Scotland. Recent reports by scientists have confirmed, plastics dumped in the world oceans are reaching a dangerous level with micro plastic particles now being found inside filter feeding animals and amongst sand grains on our beaches.

Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Children collect plastic to be sold and recycled, in a polluted river in suburban Manila. The city's trash disposal agency traps solid waste floating down waterways that was thrown into the water by residents of slums along riverbanks upstream.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

View of the Carpayo Beach in La Punta, Callao, some 15 km of Lima. In 2013, the NGO VIDA labeled the Carpayo Beach as the most polluted in the country - 40 tons of trash on each 500m2.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Trash from Kamilo Beach in Hawaii.

Gabriella Levine/Flickr

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

A scavenger collects plastic cups for recycling in a river covered with rubbish near Pluit dam in Jakarta.

Reuters

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Rubbish fills Omoa beach in Honduras. Floating masses of garbage offshore from some of the Caribbean's pristine beaches are testimony to a vast and growing problem of plastic pollution heedlessly dumped in our oceans, locals, activists and experts say.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

A man climbs down to a garbage filled river in Manila. Plastic rubbish will outweigh fish in the oceans by 2050 unless the world takes drastic action to recycle the material, a report warned in 2016.

AFP/Getty

Plastic waste across the world: in pictures

Garbage on East Beach, Henderson Island (Pitcairn Islands), in the south Pacific Ocean. The uninhabited island has been found to have the world's highest density of waste plastic, with more than 3,500 additional pieces of litter washing ashore daily at just one of its beaches.

EPA

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.

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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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