AGF join the BBC Travel Show to promote sustainable festival going!

AGF co-founder Claire O'Neill spoke with the BBC Travel Show on the environmental impacts and opportunities of music festivals, and provided tips on making the festival-going experience a more sustainable one.Claire explained the importance of ensuring that festivals do not have a negative impact on the environment but also highlighted the opportunity that festivals have in terms of being role models and for their wider influence;

"festival have a huge opportunity in the influence they have, both in their supply chains and their industry but also in culture and societal shift. For example, if Glastonbury Festival decide that from now on they're not going to have any more single use plastic bottles then all of the caterers for the UK festival network will find a different solution to using plastic water bottles"

AGF Award winners DGTL and Boom Festival also featured as great examples of festivals taking big steps in improving environmental sustainability. Boom Festival in Portugal are using funds from their event to improve the local bio-diversity. In the Netherlands, DGTL  have the ambition to become the worlds first circular festival. Mitchell van Doojijeweerd from DGTL explained;

"we achieved that by artists for example, being transferred by electric cars, and worked together with municipality of Amsterdam to create a green grid connection on site, and working with the whole sanitation chain of the event so that we can collect all the urine and poo to make fertiliser and compost. All the systems we have create such a low impact for the environment"

The actions of festival goers is also incredibly important, and Claire gave 3 top tips for more sustainable festival going;Tip 1: Use low carbon transport to get to the festivalTip 2: Only take essentials with you, and take your tent homeTip 3: Speak to festivals and artists, asking what they are doing to be sustainableThe full BBC Travel Show clip can be found here.