Love Your Tent Survey - we need YOU!

Love Your Tent, the first cross festival waste campaign aimed at campers, wants to know why? Why has leaving tents, camping equipment and general rubbish become such an endemic part of festival culture that it sees 1 in 5 people abandon everything at the festival site on a Monday morning, in favour of spending a short time taking their tents down and packing everything up, so they can reuse next time?The Love Your Tent online survey in association with A Greener Festival and Buckinghamshire New University is now live and the LYT team want as many festival goers to fill it in throughout the 2013 festival season, in an attempt to fully understand audience behaviour so the problem can be tackled through education and collective action.“We bought our tent for a tenner down the local supermarket so I’m not really bothered about it, I can always buy another one next year”  “We’ve partied a bit too much and don’t have the energy to take it down and carry it home”“I’m actually doing some good because they get sent to overseas charities for emergency shelter, don’t they?”“These are some of the responses we got last year when we asked people at one of the major festivals why they were leaving their tents behind. These answers were pretty typical but we know it doesn’t have to be like that, festival’s such as Wychwood and Shambala have proved it’s possible for audiences to take everything home with them after a weekend of partying so together we need to appeal to as many festival goers as possible to do the same. The survey is an opportunity for us to see if there are more behavioural connections that are revealed on a wider scale such as is it more typical for younger audiences to leave everything? Is there a gender sway towards disrespectful behaviour? Is it a combination of factors that contribute to people to choosing to leave everything or is there one dominant reason? These answers will allow us to tailor the focus of the Love Your Tent campaign for next year so we can start to make some headway in limiting camp field waste in the future.” says Juliet Ross-Kelly of Eco Action Partnership who launched the Love Your Tent campaign in 2012.Love Your Tent is a rapidly growing movement spearheaded by Eco Action Partnership Ltd, with the cooperation of A Greener Festival, the Association of Independent Festivals  and Sounds for Nature (Germany), with the aim of reducing camping waste and landfill at Festivals around the world, through social pressure and consciousness.“Assessing festivals around the world who take great efforts to minimise their environmental impact, one of the saddest things to see is a waste land of abandoned items from the audience. Unfortunately tents and camping equipment seem to have become disposable items in the minds of many. We fully support the Love Your Tent campaign in the hope that more will realise this sad wastefulness that desperately needs to be addressed.” comments Co-Founder of A Greener Festival, Claire O’NeillLast year the Love Your Tent campaign was nominated for a ‘Green Innovations Award’ at the annual festival awards and has since gone from strength to strength with many festivals pledging to support the campaign by helping to build awareness throughout 2013 including Wychwood, Truck, Shambala, Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, Isle of Wight, Body & Soul, Y Not and Brownstock and with more big names to be announced soon.The audience survey will be followed up with a festival organisers survey later in the year.To answer the survey, follow this linkTo join the movement and pledge your support, go to www.facebook.com/LoveYourTentFor more information visit www.loveyourtent.comHere’s to a sunny, litter free 2013 festival season!