There are no times of year when food and drink vans will not be busy. During the football season, for instance, there will be lots of passing trade on matchdays. But as we leave the domestic season behind and get ready to enjoy summer, there will be many other major trading opportunities.
Among the most obvious of these is the summer music festival season. Over the course of the next few months, there will be events attended by numbers ranging from the hundreds of thousands to a few hundred, the latter including various local events most people won’t have even heard of.
It’s Nearly Glasto Time
Taking place from June 26th-30th, Glastonbury is undoubtedly the premier festival, the one that attracts the most headlines and the biggest crowds. So far this year the likes of Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Cindi Lauper, Keane and Paloma Faith have been named in the line-up, with many more big names to come.
However, it is not just the famous performers who will make the event the spectacle it is, nor the fact that it is televised, unlike most festivals. It is the sheer scale of the event.
A decade ago, it was calculated that the daytime population of the vast arena, with its myriad of tents spread across the Somerset Levels, was 200,000 – making Glastonbury, for five days, the seventh largest city in the south of England.
That is not just an interesting stat. It means that for traders bringing their food and drink vans to the event, it is a huge sales opportunity, one that will be repeated, albeit at a lesser scale, at various other festivals during the summer, like Download, Latitude, and the twin Reading and Leeds Festivals in August.
The Environmental Impact of Festivals
However, there is also a huge potential environmental cost and some worry about the impact of these events. It’s not just the carbon footprints of travelling there; there have been some notorious aftermath scenes of hundreds of abandoned tents and mountains of discarded waste, much of it material that cannot be easily recycled.
Everyone can take steps to avoid this kind of single-use throwaway wastage. For traders, that means using packaging like coffee cups and food containers made from eco-friendly, sustainable, biodegradable materials.
Such a move is not just a conscious act by yourself and your company to be greener. It is also something that will appeal to a very large part of the audience at the festival, be it Glasto or any other.
To suggest young people completely dominate these events is to stereotype somewhat. Still, there is no doubt they are the prime demographic, who by definition have to live for longer with the consequences of what we do to the ecosystem today.
Moreover, for those who don’t feel this way – the kind who would just dump a tent – perhaps seeing the widespread use of sustainable food and drink packaging and other green measures will prod them to rethink their wastefulness.
Growing Awareness Of Green Issues At Festivals
In taking such steps, you certainly won’t be on your own. Other traders may have come to the same realisation about the impact they can have through their packaging, but organisers themselves are now focusing on these issues as well.
Glastonbury, for instance, has its own sustainability page, reminding folk that when the festival started in 1970 nobody was talking about global warming and climate change. And while the milk, cider and straw were all sourced from the farm back then, growing awareness and the increasing scale of the festival has meant much more needs to be done.
Under the mantra “Love Worthy Farm-Leave no Trace,” the festival is now trying to get people to be as green as possible, whether it is travelling by public transport or simply leaving less waste behind.
When all is said and done, however, the fact is that in a temporary city with so many mouths to feed, the reliance on packaged food and drink will be very high. That means a huge amount of packaging, adding up to a veritable mountain over the five days of the event. Loads more will be generated by the other festivals as well.
Since that means there will need to be a grand clear-up anyway, the fact that responsible festival-goers will use the bins provided instead of littering the site will still leave a big problem if the packaging material is not reusable or biodegradable.
No doubt many of the performers will be highlighting various causes close to them from the stages of these festivals. But when issues these are environmental in nature, there is an opportunity for those serving the crowds in attendance to make it easier for them to play their own part in responding well.
