Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, is the largest greenfield music festival in the world, boasting a capacity of a little over 200,000 people daily. While the festival is taking a year off in 2018, it’s clear the UK festival is still hard at work preparing for next year. Most recently, Glastonbury has made waves with its announcement that it will be banning plastic bottles on site when it returns in summer of 2019 ahead of its 50th anniversary in 2020.
With an estimated one million plastic water bottles used during the course of the five-day event, festival organizer Emily Eavis told BBC 6 Music that the new ban “is an enormous project; it’s taking a lot of time to tackle with all the different people we work with.”
As noted by The Guardian, the plastic bottle ban falls in line with the five-day festival’s previous efforts to be environmentally friendly. In 2014, Glastonbury offered stainless-steel bottles and introduced water kiosks for cost-free water refills, while in 2016, the festival added reusable stainless-steel pint cups (though the festival designed the cups to be “non-aerodynamic, to minimise injuries from throwing”). In 2016, the festival also started a “Love The Farm. Leave No Trace” initiative, which the new plastic bottle ban seems to be piggybacking off of.
[H/T Consequence Of Sound]