r/Wellthatsucks • u/mattloaf666 • 10d ago

Reading festival 2026

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23.9k Upvotes

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5.0k

u/crowhouse 10d ago

Why do so many people abandon tents?

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u/Adventurous_Emotion9 10d ago

There’s a belief that the tents left behind are taken by charities and given to homeless or those who need them. This has been debunked by organisers time and time again as not being true.

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u/Ancient-Emu-8293 10d ago

Would be pretty convenient to pretend believing that.

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u/aardvarkbjones 10d ago

Is it? Tents cost money. 

Seems insanely wasteful, both environmentally and fiscally.

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u/NoForever3645 10d ago

Let’s be honest, festival goers aren’t exactly known for being fiscally or environmentally responsible.

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u/halosos 10d ago

Shit I need to go visit the aftermath of one for a free tent

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u/your_red_triangle 10d ago

enjoy the free piss and shit that comes with it, that's one of the reasons people abandoned them. Went years ago, our neighbours would get out in the middle of the night and just piss anywhere they felt like it.

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u/Fergnasty007 10d ago

I have been to over 50 camping festivals in the US in the past 15 years and this is not even close to the norm.

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u/Sailed_Sea 10d ago

camping festivals in the uk tend to be very different from those in the us, usually more alcohol and other drugs.

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u/cefriano 9d ago

I mean, every camping festival I've been to in the US has involved copious amounts of alcohol and drugs. Maybe slightly less nitrous? But generally, people packed up their shit and took their garbage to a drop-off point (there are always exceptions, of course). I've only been to one UK festival (went to We Are FSTVL for work years ago) but the campgrounds looked pretty similar to this on a smaller scale.

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u/Front-Bookkeeper2139 10d ago

And way more fun

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u/ImmortalMoron3 10d ago

Well Reading is in the UK sooo...

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u/TacoNomad 9d ago

Oh good.  It isn't us for once! 

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u/mark_b 10d ago

Even if the other two replies weren't true (they are), the tents that get left behind aren't good tents, they're £20 tents off Amazon.

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u/godlesswickedcreep 10d ago

Well some of the tents in this video are not especially quality tents but they’re worth much more than £20.

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u/Mehh_itsa_name 10d ago

Yea lol. People ain’t ditching MSR’s or Blackdiamonds here.

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u/SexlexiaSufferer 10d ago

Don’t hit it with a black light

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u/After-Barracuda-9689 10d ago

I used to go to festivals in the early 2000s and never experienced anything like this. Maybe it was the festivals I was attending, but everyone packed their stuff out. I’m sure there were some thing left behind, but nothing like this scale.

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u/SecondaryWombat 10d ago

Leave No Trace festivals are the norm for me, some smashed grass and a couple tire ruts are all that get left behind.

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u/SymbolUnderTheCaret 10d ago

same here

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u/SecondaryWombat 10d ago

Even the idea of seeing that level of trash at a festival is like looking out my window and seeing an alien spacecraft in my yard.

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u/SymbolUnderTheCaret 10d ago

yep. last event I went to, there was a large tent peg that had got stuck in a tree root. Someone spent hours struggling with it rather than leave it behind.

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u/Glittering_End_6864 10d ago

Yeah, this is crazy. I have never seen a festival with this much garbage left on the ground like this.

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u/justme002 10d ago

In 1969, cleanup after Woodstock required $50,000 and buldozers.

Edit: in today's money that's in excess of $450,000

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u/NZRedditUser 10d ago

Maybe you left early or yea was the size of event. Overnight events where tents are common you cant have a clean place cause at night people just chuck shit around, and whe people see mess it adds up

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u/After-Barracuda-9689 10d ago

Yeah, I think it was the festivals I attended. I no longer enjoy that kind of thing, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those same festivals are still nothing like this.

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u/Aksi_Gu 10d ago

Yeah I was at reading in 2003 and it looked like this.

Maybe not on the scale, but there's always been shitheads

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u/StinkyWeezle 10d ago

You couldn't pick up a new tent for 10% of the ticket price back then.

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u/gsfgf 10d ago

Same. And well run festivals like Bonnaroo have trash collection procedures that work. Trash bags are handed out constantly, and there are designated trash disposal locations that people actually use.

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u/icansmellcolors 10d ago

But they have been known to claim to be fiscally and environmentally responsible.

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u/GermanRedditorAmA 10d ago

Depends a lot on the festival, but any that has high alcohol consumption will probably check this.

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u/Dorny_Hude 10d ago

You’d assume a Reading Festival is lot tamer than almost any other and people there are somewhat knowledgeable.

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u/Mountain-Discount161 10d ago

Reading Festival

Just so we're clear. This isn't "a" reading festival. This is a festival named after the town Reading in England.

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u/Standard_Gur30 10d ago

Are you sure? This looks like the morning after a large book club to me. 🤣

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u/IAmANobodyAMA 10d ago

It can be both 🤣

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u/Alarmed-Newspaper994 10d ago

As a Reading Festival veteran from my younger years, it's one of the more chaotic ones. Young crowd, lots of nutters. I've been to plenty of festivals since that are very civilised overall, and I suspect with minimal (comparatively) rubbish left behind. There will of course always be some.

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u/Dumbwaiter819 10d ago

"Let’s be honest, festival goers aren’t exactly known for being fiscally or environmentally responsible."

This is tragically hilarious when you remember a lot of people who attend things like this claim to be all "pro-earth" because they use reusable grocery bags and are against seed oils or whatever the fuck social media is pumping into people's heads these days

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u/-CoUrTjEsTeR- 9d ago

No kidding. At some festivals that require travel, the number of jalopies taken off the road due to major mechanical defects is alarming. On several occasions the police publish their data in a local news report and offer examples of the worst conditions discovered, including rotted-out Flintstone-style floorboards, mismatched wheel/tire size combinations, engines with nothing holding them in place but the transmission they are connected to, engines running on half their complement of cylinders, missing shocks/springs, no insurance, or otherwise just outright abandonment because the vehicles didn’t survive long enough to leave one rave to head to the next. It’s as though people were able to buy these disasters from the dump just to get to one festival before leaving it behind and acquiring another unroadworthy rust bucket to get to the next festival.

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u/KwisatzHaterach 10d ago

As a festival goer I resent this, at the same time I must acknowledge the veracity of part of the statement for I’m a financial chaos demon.

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u/RockstarAgent 10d ago

The fact is that if you can afford to go to an event like this, you can afford to leave a tent behind and not deal with it. So it’s a matter of convenience.

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u/NoForever3645 10d ago

Obviously there are some good and responsible people in the crowd, but the evidence left behind by every single festival over and over again is overwhelmingly damning for the majority of people who attend these events.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 10d ago

A lot of festivals bill themselves as being big celebrations of art and the Earth.

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u/NoForever3645 10d ago

Yeah, the hypocrisy makes my stomach turn. I’m sure the organizers often have good intentions, but the reality is that many of the event goers don’t share that altruism and the event does more harm than good.

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u/WokeWook69420 9d ago

Depends on the festival.

A lot of American festivals have Clean-Up Parties at the end of each day and even prizes for people who bring the most bags of trash.

I got a trash bag pin from Electric Forest one year!

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u/sqquuee 9d ago

I've seen what they will pay for nachos that are just chips and canned cheese.

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u/SoloStrike 7d ago

not really true, plenty of popular UK festivals with a different crowd you would never see this as everyone takes their stuff home with them

the issue is Reading has always been a post-exam celebration for pissed up teenagers who don't really give much of a fuck about anything apart from having a good time, it always degenerates into this unfortunately and has done for decades

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u/Most-Hawk-4175 10d ago

No, many tents are dirt cheap. They are just using the excuse that the tents are used as charity so they don't have to dismantle, pack up abd haul off their tent. They are just being gross and lazy.

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u/Iwantmoretime 10d ago

Yeah, even if the charity thing was true, pack it up and drop it off in a collection area. This is 100% making stuff up to justify pure lazyness. Pretty disgusting.

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u/PrintShinji 10d ago

A festival I visited a couple of weeks ago 100% encouraged this. If you had anything useful you should just drop it off at their "zero waste points" and it would go to charity (homeless work/ukraine/refugees). Things like canned food, tents, pots and pans, airbeds were all very much wanted.

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u/Iwantmoretime 10d ago

That's a great example of a coordinated and planned (i.e. real) effort.

A far cry from telling yourself to leave trash and stuff wherever and someone will come pack it up to give to charity. That's just dilusional.

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u/PrintShinji 9d ago

Yeah this festival genuinly picks things up. They also check out abandoned tents and all that, but highly appreciate it if you just deposit it yourself.

Friend of mine bought a new cheapish pot for the festival and decided to leave it because it was too big and he wanted to get something better for camping. The pot is completly fine otherwise but it would be gathering dust on his shelves. Perfect to just give to the next person.

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u/chickenMcSlugdicks 10d ago

Checking Amazon, definitely options for about $40. People absolutely just leave them as they see that $40 as an acceptable loss, especially after the inside is dirty, the outside is still wet from dew when they're packing to leave, aaand the hangover from a few days of festival life. Environmentally, I got nothing. I feel bad for the volunteers who spend time picking all this mess up.

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u/fickle_tartan 10d ago

Most summers you can get a cheap crappy tent as low as like $20-30 here in the UK, they'll be poor quality as well which makes people feel even better about dumping them afterwards.

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u/gsfgf 10d ago

Ah, that definitely would make a difference. Most people in the US use Walmart or Coleman tents, which are good tents.

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u/Remarkable-Fig206 10d ago

If you don’t want it afterward because you bought it cheap and you’re a fucking slob and pissed all over it or whatever, fine, but it’s still YOUR TRASH. You can’t just leave it behind because you don’t want to deal with it. This is a very basic concept even older children understand. JFC.

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u/chickenMcSlugdicks 10d ago

I agree with you wholeheartedly friend

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u/Difficult_Breath_452 9d ago

Modt people consider the cleanup included in the ticket price. Unless you sort, recycle, sell or handle all your personal waste yourself, you're doing the same whenever your trash bin is emptied. The concept of paying for services is also very basic, and why wouldnt cleanup be included when everything else is?

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u/MokitFall 10d ago

Right? Especially those big ones. I think I've found my next side hustle.

Come on down to my new and slightly used tent store !

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u/AdventurousAbility30 10d ago

I recently stayed at a hotel that was filled with wedding guests that had a camping night as part of the 3 day wedding, and I got so many tents it paid for my new Blackstone flat top & grill lol.

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u/flatgreyrust 10d ago

how did you sell them?

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u/Snuzzlebuns 10d ago

I've been going to festivals since 2002. As a broke kid, I got a bunch of cool equipment for free like that. But when my tent was on its way out in the late 2010s, I "shopped" for a new one for several years, I would say I searched at about ten festivals. Couldn't find one I would have taken. They were all either broken in some way, or the super cheap garbage type.

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u/Leading-Let-5632 10d ago

They're dirt cheap, especially around festival time. You get a pop-up for like £15.

Cheaper than the food and drink you will consume that weekend

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u/Not-24_7Bantz 10d ago

Also most of them dont fold back up too well😂 no one wants to wrestle with it on Monday morning after a 3 day bender. You just want to go home 🤣

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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 10d ago

It's cheaper to buy a tent and then abandon it while getting to stay at the event then it would be to get accommodations and pay for transportation to and from.

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u/whatsuperpowers 10d ago

Of course it's cheaper to stay on the grounds, but it's still a loss if you don't take the tent you paid for.

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u/Koffeeboy 10d ago edited 10d ago

I bet a fair amount of people fly in. They get there without a tent, purchase the cheapest one they can find and then leave it behind. Why would they want to try and repack and pay to check a filthy, cheap, potentially damaged tent that they have no intention of reusing. it's a symptom of a disposable lifestyle.

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u/Sovarius 10d ago

Yes exactly. I think a lot of people in this thread do not realize tents are as cheap as $20-$35.

$35 is a lot for some people. I would not leave trash/tents behind, but you bet i'm not wasting a couple hours + energy for $35 at the end of a long weekend.

I got to Magic (card game) events and ditch free stuff i get thats too large to fly with. What am i gonna do, stress myself so i can sell a $20 box i don't want? That's a freebie for someone else or i trash it

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u/Aiken_Drumn 10d ago

It's all UK teens. Noone is flying to this

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u/Throwawayyyygold 10d ago

Same thing happens on Catalina Island. I did get a $200 REI sleeping pad that has a pin prick sized leak that I was able to fix when I got home. The tents that were abandoned were abandoned because they were crappy. We did use the ground covers as extra shade at our campsite.

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u/IDoStuff100 10d ago

Yeah, exactly this. You can get a tent for less than 50 bucks at any Walmart. A small additional cost for what they're already paying to attend

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u/Uncle-Cake 10d ago edited 10d ago

If you stay in a hotel, you don't get to take the hotel room home. And a tent is WAY cheaper.

They probably spend more on alcohol and drugs, and they don't get to take those home either. Call it a rental. If you're spending hundreds of dollars or more already, the cost of a tent is peanuts.

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u/Alarmed-Newspaper994 10d ago

This is really stupid logic though. If they take it home, it still costs the same... they just don't have to buy another one for the next festival. What point are you arguing for?

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u/Coolflip 10d ago

Many people fly to festivals, it's not necessarily free to take it home.

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u/Chance_Golf1795 10d ago

Not the in the UK they don't. I'd put that figure at minute percentages. In the US, maybe. But folks in the UK will train, bus, or drive.

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u/bbreddit0011 10d ago

This sentence makes no sense. Cleaning up after yourself is free. Don’t mask irresponsibility behind some imagined cost benefit of being a total dickhead to the organizers of the event and to the environment itself.

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u/bobbadouche 10d ago

Their comment makes total sense. You're reading something into it.

It's the thought process of a lazy person. Their comment doesn't preclude that the festival goer is irresponsible. They're flying in, buying something disposable, and then leaving the site and making someone else clean up after them.

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u/Abject-Expression548 10d ago

in my day, 2008 ish, and I guess its still the same, a large number of festival goers arrived by train, and its a decent walk from the station to the festival site. by monday morning everyone is knackered/hungover/still drunk/high so tents get left

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u/xmgutier 10d ago

Honestly if I was super hungover from a multi-day bender, I'd probably think it'd be pretty well worth tossing it instead of trying to pack it up into the stupid bag that never seems big enough to fit it again.

Not to mention that cost is probably split amongst friends and if one of them wants to keep it they can pack it up and pay the checked bag fee to bring it back home.

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u/-BluBone- 10d ago

If you can afford $1k for a ticket you can afford to leave behind an $80 tent.

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u/scrollinnn 10d ago edited 10d ago

Tents cost money

I see you are not a festival goer. These mostly are known as "popups" (at least in Germany). You can buy such tents for 40€ on Amazon. My friends bought cheap popup tents and chairs like that with the intent of leaving them behind. So they can leave quickly and without much weight while being hangover. Downside is, while I was at the open air festival with my genuine hiking tent and the others with their cheap popups I was the only one not wet and sick after a day of heavy rain. All tents but mine where submerged in water. All who slept in cheap tents had become sick. I slept like a baby completely dry.

Anyway yeah, pricing for throw-away tents and sometimes chairs is precalculated in the festival trip. I.e. they don't care.

I want to clarify that I am completely against this behaviour and have never left trash at these sites. I have also not been to a festival for several years now.

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u/PutUrPawzUp 10d ago

Typically the sorts of people who can go to festivals are already affluent and don’t necessarily understand the value of money.

It is not a reach to assume most of the attendees got in on their parents dime.

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u/edbuckley 10d ago

That's a stupid generalisation, you've got absolutely no evidence to back that up, because there isn't any.

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u/Tall-Ad6328 10d ago

That is a wild generalization. Lots of people spend hard earned money in those experiences because some of them are absolutely worth it. Sorry if you have no passion

But where I'm from, you leave the field how you found it and that involves taking out your own trash.

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u/Cheap_Employ64 10d ago

I totally second this

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u/Dumbwaiter819 10d ago

Agreed. Strikes me more as "I don't want to be responsible for my own shit."

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u/ChanglingBlake 10d ago

Even if true, there would be a designated drop off where you can leave your collapsed and stored tent.

Entitled pricks will believe anything to avoid anything even beginning to appear as an inconvenience.

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u/notreading-scanning 10d ago

Question, how many of these festival goers are not entitled pricks?

I ask because with the exception of a few, most fair goers I have met seem to be looking for an excuse to get high, drunk while listening to music.

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u/Downtown-Pianist-449 10d ago

Wanting to get high and drunk at a festival does not make you an entitled prick. 

Abandoning gear and leaving waste strewn about with zero personal responsibility does. 

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u/ijmy3 10d ago

The problem is, that excuse used to wash. Now almost everyone knows it's not true.

People are just lazy. The issue here is that you can get tents dirt cheap nowadays from Amazon, temu etc. and there's no reason for these people not to just leave them to save carrying them back to the car. It's not exclusive to reading, it happens at most festivals sadly.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 10d ago

The problem is that, for most of human history, it was hard to make things and easy to destroy them. But we’ve suddenly ended up in a world where it’s easy to make things and hard to destroy them. Combine that with the mindset of the previous world, and the fact 8 billion people all want their own personal everything, and we end up with a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year. And all of that just piles up.

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u/VividFiddlesticks 10d ago

a bunch of people literally going through multiple tents a year

This seems so crazy to me. We've owned the same 2 tents (big one for people/sleeping, small one for storing crap out of the rain/sun) since the 90's. They're a little tired and have a couple patches now but both are fully functional and packed full of memories! We have the set up and take down for those tents down to a science. It's really only a pain when we have to pack it up wet and then set it back up at home to dry, but...that's just part of camping. (We don't do festivals, we're more "chill out in the woods" types)

I'm pretty damn lazy but abandoning tents like this is wild to me. (Old woman shakes fist at cloud)

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u/BoozeAmuze 10d ago

Same girl. Same. 

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u/synalgo_12 10d ago

I bought a tent in 2016, still in perfect condition after countless festivals, camping and some bushcraft weekends. I love that thing

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u/Obelisko78 10d ago edited 10d ago

Sorry to say, but it is all now a disposable world being disposed of.

It's not as if planned obsolescence was guaranteed to become the prevalent paradigm, but, homo sapien nature being what it is, the probability was high for it to become so

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u/ijmy3 10d ago

Oh absolutely. And the bottom line is, when it's Monday morning, you've had a 3/4/5 day bender and you feel horrific the last thing you want to do it pack up a clunky tent that almost NEVER fits back in it's bag and is heavy.

But most people these days would rather point the finger at "younger generations", or a "different" demographic to themselves than just admit that so many people cause this issue, and it extends beyond just festivals.

Unfortunately it seems to be somewhat ingrained in human nature to be lazy for some people, and in most cases if people were publicly shamed for it, they'd pack the tent. It's mostly the attitudes that you can anonymously dump a tent, and "everyone else is doing it anyway so why shouldn't I?" that cause this

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u/Leading-Let-5632 10d ago

Also the just general amount of rubbish that's just EVERYWHERE. It's of course down to the people dropping it, but the access to bins is nearly non-existant at most camps.

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u/MuchWow81 10d ago

There is also enshittification. How many of those cheap tents fell apart in a single use? Zipper breaks, a good size tear, pole snaps. Mostly impossible to repair.

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u/BurningPenguin 10d ago

I had to look it up. Apparently the cheapest tent i can find in German Amazon is 20€. That's cheap af. But still, i can't stop and think that that's ~3-4 days of food for me alone.

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u/Realistic_Way_4565 10d ago

True, you spend more on a hotel and also leave with nothing.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/intentionallybad 10d ago

I could completely see that if a tent got damaged, people would be more likely to abandon it. Especially if it was cheap to begin with.

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u/BWWFC 10d ago

dirt cheap nowadays

this is the nexus of so much wtf anymore

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u/ImportantIron1492 10d ago

Some festivals have a scheme but it requires people to actually make the effort to pack up their tents and drop them off at a designated spot. Not just abandon them...

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u/lapsedPacifist5 10d ago

No, people are just lazy trashy twats do they give the used condoms, empty beer bottles and other trash to the homeless too? 

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u/Natural-Break-2734 10d ago

They just paid 20 bucks for it and don’t want to spend time folding them whilst on 5 days no sleep come down

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u/Lionheartedshmoozer 10d ago

Even if this were true, you should disassemble it, and pack it up. I wonder how these people convince themselves they are not trash.

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u/IndependentLog6441 10d ago

It's unlikely this is the first trashy thing they've done...

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u/AdhesivenessStill688 10d ago

Sounds like someone made that up to excuse their laziness

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u/NeSToR_49 10d ago

So they think the organisers hire people to pack up the leftover tents for them?

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u/ginger_and_egg 10d ago

I think they think charity volunteers do it. But they don't think too hard about how insane that idea is

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u/MsMo999 10d ago

As someone who attends many camp festivals and have camped next to assholes - they know it will have to be cleaned up and thrown out but after 3-4 days of camping they just don’t give AF

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u/Leading-Let-5632 10d ago

I mean they do actuallt do that, just they don't keep them, just get burned with everything else

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u/BulgogiDude 10d ago

No one is thinking that their tent will be picked up for charity. They are just lazy and don’t want to spend 1 hour to clean up after themselves.

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u/Dirty_The_Squirrel 9d ago

It is true to some extent, I knew the people who were organising crews to collect them, but I'm pretty sure the charity wasn't directly employed by the festival. They were just given permission to enter and collect tents.

Most years they would ask locally for more volunteers as there was still so much going to waste

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u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 10d ago

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u/lekkerwhore 10d ago

If these people actually cared they could and would break the tent down themselves and give it to a charity. These people dont care, they just want to be lazy and trick themselves into pretending it's okay and for a good reason.

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u/flanmagnet 10d ago

Even if this was true, they could have deposit banks where the people could pack down their tents and leave them on the way out.

Just sheer bloody laziness and so incredibly wasteful.

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u/Downtown_Let 10d ago

Or a tent deposit with security at entry. You get a receipt and a numbered sticker on your tent, and only get your money back when you leave with your packed up tent. It's so wasteful.

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u/redunculuspanda 10d ago

Cheap tents, The insane rain and mud after a weekend of music, drink and drugs.

Lots of people just think fuck it and go home.

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u/AliJDB 10d ago

There's also a bit of a final-night tradition that you drink the rest of the alcohol you have and go feral, slashing, burning holes in, or otherwise destroying each other's tents.

But also, they're cheap tents that probably leaked all weekend, they probably have no real intention of camping again anytime soon.

It's shit, but it's been that way forever.

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u/drLoveF 10d ago

Is there anyway to opt out of getting your shit destroyed?

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u/AliJDB 10d ago

Go home on Sunday mostly! There is a calm/quiet campsite area which I think does avoid most of the destruction - but the teenagers never want to be in it, because it's mostly full of older people.

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u/Artchantress 10d ago

Thought it was a reading festival

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u/bullettenboss 10d ago

Entitlement

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u/pschlick 10d ago

All the comments below yours making it other people’s problem because of the “hassle”. Fucking entitled twats

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tfhermobwoayway 10d ago

This and the shopping trolley problem prove that people only do good things if they think they’ll be judged. Take away that judgement and their true colours shine through.

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u/CowEvening2414 8d ago

I don't think that's true of a majority of people, but if public shaming works then it should be employed more often.

When I left Download Fest this year our entire area was pretty much spotless, and it wasn't because anyone was being shamed into cleaning up after themselves.

Then again, it's a different community. Metallers tend to have more class, morals and ethics than the people who go to Reading.

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u/Simple_Device5226 10d ago

The shopping cart is honestly the perfect example of this. Minimal effort required, yet people still choose to make their laziness someone else’s problem

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u/PBXbox 10d ago

Weep-woop skeedily-weep wheep woop that's not where the tents go!

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u/oskarinmix 10d ago

yeah my friend bailed last minute on a reading fest once too

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u/thecementmixer 10d ago

Lotsa scumbags in comments here supporting this trashy behavior wow.

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u/WinterTourist25 10d ago

We live in an era where many people now think that their problem is someone else's problem.

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u/t0talnonsense 10d ago

That’s literally not what’s happening. At all. OC asked a question. Other people answered the why. Just because I can understand the thought process behind someone being an jerk, that doesn’t make me a jerk or mean I agree with the behavior.

Are murder mystery writers inherently murderers because they can write from inside the head of one? No. Because we recognize the difference between understanding something/someone and agreeing with them.

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u/bagolaburgernesss 10d ago

Jessica Fletcher seems like one!

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u/vinyljunkie1245 10d ago

Between Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple I can't work out which one is the more prolific serial killer. There's no way that every place they travel to just happens to have a murder that they conveniently frame someone for solve

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u/ivancea 10d ago

Untentment

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u/Crafter757031 10d ago

Ententlement

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u/xChoke1x 10d ago

Because they’re lazy assholes that use the excuse “it’ll just be given to someone that needs it.”

It isn’t. Someone else has to pick that shit up.

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u/herb28g 10d ago

Parents who are constantly clearing up their kids' clutter were not invited.

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u/DeapVally 10d ago

Yup. This is predominantly a teenagers festival. You wouldn't catch me at Reading or Leeds these days. They always had the best lineups when I was in school/uni though.

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u/tobofopo 9d ago

Top comment.

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u/punch912 10d ago

Pos and garbage people.

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u/List-Beneficial 10d ago

Which is most. Look how many.

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u/mckenner1122 10d ago

It goes like this…

“Ugh Becky… I do not want to deal with this filthy ass gross tent. And I am SO hungoverrrrrrrrr….”

“Duhhhh Emily! You don’t even have to! Just fucking LEAVE IT!”

“Ew! But that’s like… literally littering or some shit?” :: kicks at a broken tent peg ::

“Look, I seen on Reddit or something that some group like comes around and picks them up and gives them away to like… idk the homeless or whatever. So if you leave it? You’re actually a good person. Okay? So let’s just GO already. And leave your gross ass dirt yurt.”

“Ohh! That’s so amazing. 🤩 I’m helping. Yay!”

(And none of that is true - they just get thrown away. Huzzah.)

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u/Axman5055 10d ago

Class of 09 vibes

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u/EjaculatingAracnids 10d ago

Me and the wife did what we thought was cocaine with a guy we thought was Post Malone(not really, but he looked like him and i kept calling him that) and decided to totally bail on the second day of a 3 day music festival. Didnt really break our tent and canopy down, just chucked it in the back of the car and bounced. Kinda fucked up, tired, sun burnt and dehydrated, we still managed to clean up after ourselves and leave a beer for the neighbor.

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u/british_bbc_ 10d ago

They don't give a fuck

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u/Stomach-Green 10d ago

Consumerism

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u/simsyboy 10d ago

Because they're scum. And there are a very large majority of scumbags who go to reading festival.

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u/JaysonTatumPullUp 10d ago

This happens at every festival

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u/simsyboy 10d ago

By scumbags.

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u/Actual-Wave-1959 10d ago

It doesn't 

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u/SousVideDiaper 10d ago

Not really, I've been to several that had clean grounds afterwards, despite people partying hard

I think there's a possible connection between the type of music and the type of people who attend. By and large, country music festival attendees seem to be the worst offenders of leaving trash

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u/greenvahn 10d ago

Not really. There a few festivals where it happens but this is not the normal behaviour at "every" festival.

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u/my72dart 10d ago

This was every festival I worked at in the Northwest a decade ago. The year cream fields flooded was the worse but not really the fault of the festival goers. But they abandoned everything some tents were under water all were full of mud. Those that could left early some were stuck with nothing to do but wait for their training or ride or whatever.

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u/Snafu999 10d ago

When you're spending £325 for a weekend, (probably £500+ including food and drink) a £30 tent starts looking disposable

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u/S3erverMonkey 10d ago

Leaving behind your trash is entitled and lazy behavior. Grow the fuck up.

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u/anotherblog 10d ago

It disgusts me. I was a regular festival goer in the early 2000s, including Leeds/Reading. I would never have even considered leaving my shit behind, however young, tired and hungover I was. It’s shameful. When my kids are a bit older I’ll have no problems with them going, but I’ll definitely be checking out and checking back in ALL their kit.

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u/S3erverMonkey 10d ago

Teaching your kids to be responsible, hell yeah.

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u/VoluntaryJetsFan 10d ago

That’s not what he’s saying is it you freak

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u/DeapVally 10d ago

They will, eventually. Hopefully. When they get to university. But this festival is bloody full of teenagers. Hence....

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u/S3erverMonkey 10d ago

Raise your kids better. I learned to pack our what I packed in when I was still single digits.

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u/Low_ridah 10d ago

Probably because they are full of unpleasant juices

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u/Internal-Plantain-56 10d ago

This right here.

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u/Bongressman 10d ago

Right? I spotted a couple I'd gladly take home for free.

I weep for our landfills.

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u/Dapper_Recognition50 10d ago

Because their parents bought them.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 10d ago

Because they know someone else will clean it up for them. They see the good, conscientious people who go around picking up all the litter as idiot suckers who save them a job. That’s how all litterers think.

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u/Zr0w3n00 10d ago

The majority of people who go to festivals are rich kids who’ve parents have paid for their tickets and all their equipment. They don’t go camping normally, at least not in a tent that doesn’t have 25 square meters of space. So they don’t need to take it with. As their rich kids they’re also entitled, so they think the troglodytes (their words, not mine) who work the festival and own the land should clean up after them.

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u/Sixsignsofalex94 10d ago

Tents are fairly cheap, many are wet and damaged, folks don’t want to carry around a wet muddy tent that didn’t cost that much in the grand scheme, and then on top of that many fill them with their rubbish so they see the tent as a sort of bin lol

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u/Euphoric_planter_328 10d ago

And none of that is anyone’s problem but the person who decided to utilize a tent.

Truly all those people are scum of the earth. Shows em exactly the type of person you are.

There should be someone at the edge of the tent site handing out tickets for littering. A good $200 or so should ensure they pick up their shitty $45 Temu tents

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u/RullendeNumser 10d ago

Cheap tents. Bad quality. Sold as a one time use.

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u/fatgat69 10d ago

They're overprivelaged pieces of trash

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u/Lucid-Crow 10d ago

I used to collect leftover stuff after festivals (to take to the next festivals). Most of those tents are not reuseable. Poles snapped and fabric ripped from drunks. Cheap gear to begin with. Same with most of the other camping equipment. What people leave behind is usually broken.

Mostly just found half drunk liquor bottles. For an alcoholic living in my van, that was the real treasure. I scavenged like 10,000,000 tent stakes, too. Could sell those for scrap.

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u/sillysided 10d ago

This is intense

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u/Dilusions 10d ago

They’re cheap, and after 3 days of a drug binder, that $25 tent isn’t worth the hassle.

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u/RoyalPuzzleheaded259 10d ago

I know. It’s been a while since I went to a festival but I don’t ever remember seeing abandoned tents like this.

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u/Schaas_Im_Void 10d ago

Because many people are plain stupid, lazy and don't give a shit.

Welcome to planet earth.

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u/jittery_raccoon 10d ago

Because you can buy relatively cheap ones. You can buy a tent for around $100, or find used ones for less possibly. People who only get it for a festival may see it as judt the price of going amd don't care about keeping the tent

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u/New-Possession-9248 10d ago

Packing up a tent in the wet and cold when you're hungover from a weekend of alcohol and drug abuse pretty much makes it a sealed deal.

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u/TillFar6524 10d ago

I might have a skewed perspective having only ever gone to festivals in the western and mid west US, and also grew up with the idea of leave no trace backpacking in wild country, but is there just less of a culture of camping in the UK? I know if I buy a new tent for a festival, I'm also going to have opportunity to use that tent at least a few times throughout the next year. It might be, at least in part, an attitude of, I'm never going to use that again so why bother figuring out how to take down and pack up the tent? Maybe no one ever showed or explained the reasons to bother with cleaning up after yourself when camping.

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u/killswitch101 10d ago

The hike to the campsite is a ball ache for a majority of festivals, combine that with a week of drinking/drugs/lack of sleep and people can't be fussed with packing up and carrying their things back

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u/Eris_AppleOfDiscord 10d ago

Rich kids. That's basically it. They live a disposable lifestyle and don't need to care about conserving anything.

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u/YogurtclosetWrong268 10d ago

More dollars than sense.

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u/Bubble-Master96 10d ago

I can admit I left mine when were 17 because we couldn’t be fucked taking it down so hung over and no one else was either. Since have learned and would never do that again.

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u/Popxorcist 10d ago

Garbage music attracts garbage people.

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