11Waste, carbon and the town next door

The short version: A festival is a temporary town, and it leaves the same marks a town does: carbon from getting there and keeping the lights on, tonnes of waste, noise over the fence, and money in local tills. The best-known UK estimate (2015) says audience travel is "up to 80%" of festival emissions; a 2023 study of measured events put the average at 41%, with a range of 18% to 76%. Generators are moving from diesel to HVO, a renewable diesel whose green credentials are contested. The economic impact numbers festivals publish are real estimates, usually commissioned, and rarely comparable from one event to the next.

How big is a festival's carbon footprint?

The number most people quote comes from The Show Must Go On, a report published in November 2015 by Powerful Thinking, a UK industry consortium. It estimated that UK festivals emit about 100,000 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent, every greenhouse gas converted into one carbon number) a year once audience travel is counted, and about 20,000 tonnes from the sites themselves.²⁰⁹ The benchmarks were supplied by Julie's Bicycle, a UK climate charity for the creative sector that also runs Powerful Thinking's secretariat, with De Montfort University and Oxford's Environmental Change Institute as research partners.²¹⁰ The consortium's founders were festival-side: Bestival, Festival Republic, A Greener Festival, the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), Kambe Events and Firefly Solar.²¹⁰

On site, the same report found energy was about 65% of the footprint and waste about 35%. UK festivals were burning about 5 million liters (roughly 1.3 million US gallons) of diesel a year and producing about 23,500 tonnes of waste, with typical recycling rates likely below 32% (all 2015 estimates).²⁰⁹

The report launched on 26 November 2015 with a pledge: festivals were asked to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2025.²¹⁰ That pledge became Vision: 2025. Over 100 events had signed by 2020, and a second edition of the report followed.²¹¹

No US-wide festival carbon benchmark turned up in this research, so the UK figures are the reference point.

Is audience travel really 80% of festival emissions?

Not on average. "Up to 80%" is a 2015 ceiling; a 2023 study of assessed events put the average at 41%. The two figures side by side:

A Greener Future's study, as reported by CMU in August 2023, argued the industry had been overstating travel's share.²¹² The 2015 report's "up to" does a lot of work: it is a ceiling, not an average. Both agree travel is usually the largest single slice.

The range is the useful part. A city festival most people reach by subway or bus will sit near the low end. A destination festival in a field, where a share of the crowd flies in from another country, will sit near the top.

What is HVO, and why are festivals switching to it?

HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) is a renewable diesel made from waste oils and fats that runs in ordinary diesel generators without modification. That drop-in quality is why festivals like it: the generator fleet stays the same, the fuel changes.

Glastonbury 2023 (June 21-25) ran "all generators across the festival site," including the Pyramid Stage, on HVO made from used cooking oil, described as palm-oil free, with a claimed CO2 reduction of up to 90%. Production areas were to draw electricity from low-impact sources or solar-battery systems, and a temporary wind turbine was to power some market stalls (pre-festival plans).¹²⁹ In Hull, Humber Street Sesh switched all its stages, bars and lighting from diesel to HVO in 2023; the supplier estimated a drop from 3,302 kg to 46 kg of carbon emissions.²¹³

The catch comes from Transport and Environment, a European clean-transport advocacy group. In a January 30, 2026 piece, it said HVO's top feedstocks are now used cooking oil, palm oil mill effluent and animal fats; that certification is hard to verify for supply from China, Indonesia and Malaysia; that a whistleblower alleges virgin palm oil has been mislabeled as sludge; and that in the best case HVO "only halves" CO2 compared with diesel once indirect emissions are counted.²¹⁴

So the claims run from "up to 90% lower" (suppliers and festivals) to "only halves" in the best case (T&E). No independent lifecycle audit of any single festival's HVO turned up here. The cleaner long-term option, where a site has it, is a grid connection or batteries and solar.

No US festival running its whole site on HVO turned up in this research. The nearest US example goes the battery route: Lollapalooza in Chicago powered its main stage with a hybrid battery system in 2024 and brought it back in 2025 with over 1.5 MWh of storage, cutting how long its biodiesel generators ran. Live Nation, the festival's promoter, claimed the 2024 system cut main stage fuel use 67%, saved more than 3,000 gallons and avoided 26 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (company figures, July 2025).²¹⁵

Why did Glastonbury stop selling plastic bottles?

Because it was selling a lot of them. Glastonbury sold over 1 million single-use plastic drinks bottles in 2017, and announced on 27 February 2019 that none would be sold on site or backstage at the 2019 festival.²¹⁶ In their place: canned soft drinks and canned water, free drinking water at all bars, "hundreds of free water taps," and three times as many WaterAid kiosks. Attendees could still bring their own bottles.²¹⁶

The same post put numbers on the recycling side: about 45 tonnes of aluminum cans and about 40 tonnes of plastic bottles recycled at the previous festival.²¹⁶

No published audit of how much plastic the 2019 change removed turned up in this research.

How do reusable cups work at Roskilde?

Roskilde, in Denmark, runs one of the cleanest deposit systems in the business. Your first cup costs 5 DKK (under one US dollar). You can swap it freely for a beer, drink or coffee cup at the bar. When you hand a cup back, you get 1 DKK; the other 4 DKK pays for running the system. Cups can be stored on your wristband, up to 12 at a time. The system was introduced in 2019, and about 2 million cups go through it per festival (official figures).²¹⁷

A deposit cup works because the cup is worth something on the ground, so dropped cups get picked up. Deposit cups are common at festivals in northern Europe and much less common at US events.

What happens to tents left at festivals?

Most go to landfill, by the estimate of AIF, the UK's independent festivals trade body; its 2019 figure of 250,000 a year, and how Glastonbury gets 99% of tents taken home, are in Camping, getting there and getting home.²¹⁸ AIF's "Take Your Tent Home" campaign launched on 8 May 2019 and asked retailers, including Tesco and Argos, to stop marketing cheap tents as "festival tents," a label that implies single use.²¹⁸

This is mostly a camping-festival problem. City day festivals, which describes most big US events, do not generate it at the same scale.

No count of abandoned tents at US festivals turned up. At Bonnaroo in Tennessee, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported in 2018 that a local outdoor resale shop, the Gear Closet, sends a cleanup crew to collect usable tents, tarps and other gear left in the fields; in 2017 it took about 4 tons of the festival's more than 500 tons of waste.²¹⁹

Why does Glastonbury take a year off?

Glastonbury happens on a working dairy farm, and the farm needs its fields back. Emily Eavis confirmed 2026 as a fallow year - a year the festival skips - to "give the land a rest," adding that "it gives the cows a chance to stay out for longer and reclaim their land."²²⁰ She also said the break gives the audience time off and keeps the festival from being seen as "cashing in."²²⁰ So no, there is no Glastonbury in 2026; the history of its fallow years is in The global festival season.

Most festivals on parks or fairgrounds face a different limit: a cap on how many days a year the land can be used for events (see Brockwell Park below).

How much money does a festival bring to a town?

Festivals commission economic impact studies to win permits and local support. A headline figure usually adds direct spending to "indirect" effects (suppliers buying from their suppliers) and induced effects (people spending wages they earned from the festival). Some studies count worldwide spending. Methods differ, so numbers from different festivals are not comparable, and most are estimates paid for by the festival or a tourism body.

Glastonbury's 2023 summary is the most detailed: the festival cost about £62 million to put on, paid to 922 organizations, with a little under £12 million going to 258 Somerset firms. It reported 1,100+ UK jobs sustained, 325 of them in Somerset, for 140,000+ ticket holders across 100+ stages.²²¹ It also counted the housing spillover: about 4,000 offsite campsite guests spent about £6.5 million, and about 900 hotel and B&B guests about £450,000.²²¹

The Coachella projection was based on 273,000 expected attendees across the 2016 events, and the article reporting it is not fully consistent on totals.²²² Bonnaroo's 2012 study added $2.9 million in state taxes and over $580,000 in Coffee County taxes, and noted the festival briefly makes the county Tennessee's seventh-largest city.²²³ The jump from $51.1 million to $339 million over 11 years is more likely a change in method and scope than pure growth, but the 2023 study's method was behind a paywall, so that is unconfirmed.

Can you rent your house out during a festival?

Around Coachella, plenty of people do. In 2019, an Indio host told KESQ he charged $300 for a master bedroom, $250 for smaller rooms and $100 for a backyard tent space, and made over $10,000 that month. In the same story, Indio police warned that violating the city's short-term vacation rental ordinance (occupancy limits, amplified sound, quiet hours, renting without a permit) could bring fines from $500 into the thousands; the host said he renews his permit every year, with a home inspection.²²⁵

A third-party rental guide, last updated July 2025 and flagged as outdated, lists a $100 permit, a primary-residence rule, a 20-guest cap and a 13% Transient Occupancy Tax.²²⁶ Check the city's current rules before listing; those details change.

How loud can a festival be near homes?

In the UK, the reference is the 1995 Noise Council Code of Practice on Environmental Noise Control at Concerts, known as the Pop Code. As summarized in a 2011 Edinburgh Napier University report for Defra, it sets music noise targets measured 1 meter from the facade of nearby homes, averaged over 15 minutes (LAeq, in dB(A), decibels weighted to match how human ears hear):²²⁷

The code applies to events between 9am and 11pm.²²⁷ Councils write these figures into licensing conditions. In the US there is no national code; limits come from city permits and local noise ordinances.

Most disputes are about bass. Low frequencies travel farther and pass through walls more easily than the rest of the mix, so a set that measures within limits can still rattle a kitchen a mile away. Curfews, decibel limits and the "agent of change" principle (who adapts when homes and venues sit side by side) are covered in depth in the sister guide at https://noise.cold.fyi/nightlife/.

The code has not been replaced. A 2020 Institute of Acoustics paper by Wheeler, Sharp and Taherzadeh says it "remains the most up-to-date guidance on the control of music noise at events" in the UK, and that refinements suggested in a 2006 study were never taken forward.²²⁸ The paper does not point to any separate national low-frequency standard.

Who decides whether a festival can happen?

Local government, mostly, and it can say no.

Woodstock 50 (2019). The planned anniversary festival needed a permit from the Town of Vernon, New York. The town denied it as "incomplete and filed too late," citing no concrete traffic plan and no access control, and the planning board unanimously rejected the appeal on July 16, 2019. The Oneida County Executive cited "inadequate planning and a dangerously truncated timeframe," and memories of Woodstock 99 in nearby Rome were part of the local reaction.²²⁹

Brockwell Park, London (2025). UK permitted development rights allow temporary use of land, such as a festival, for up to 28 days a year without full planning permission. In May 2025, residents' group Protect Brockwell Park won a High Court ruling quashing Lambeth Council's certificate for that year's events, which included Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross The Tracks, City Splash, Mighty Hoopla and the Lambeth Country Show. The residents said festivals affected the park for about 37 days.

Organizers reapplied for 24 days and said nothing would be canceled.²³⁰ The residents framed it as the loss of a public park; Lambeth framed it as a procedural issue within a sound legal framework.²³⁰

Electric Zoo, New York (2023). On Randall's Island, Friday of the September 1-3 festival was canceled hours before doors. Per Billboard, as reported by EDM Identity, organizers lacked NYC Parks permits for Friday and inspectors found safety problems with the main stage; Saturday opened two hours late.²³¹ On Sunday, gates closed around 6:30 PM, the NYPD estimated about 7,000 tickets had been sold beyond the 42,500 capacity, and a crowd rushed the gates. Mayor Eric Adams said the city would "deal with" the organizers.²³² Owner Avant Gardner had bought the festival from LiveStyle in 2022.²³¹

How do you volunteer at a festival for free?

The standard deal at UK festivals: work set shifts, put down a refundable deposit, and get free entry and a crew campsite. Volunteers staff gates, stewarding, recycling and bars, and many sign up through charities that fundraise from the work. Stewarding is the name for the crowd and gate side of it; the UK licensing line between stewards and security is in Crowds, heat and keeping people safe.

Oxfam's 2025 program sought 9,000 volunteers across Glastonbury, Boomtown, Isle of Wight, Boardmasters, Latitude, and Reading and Leeds. The terms: three eight-hour shifts per festival, one refundable deposit, free entry, a secure campsite, crew showers and a meal voucher per shift. Volunteers who do two or more festivals get priority the next year. In 2024, Oxfam volunteers worked over 213,000 hours and helped raise £1.8 million.²³³

At Glastonbury 2023, more than 10,000 volunteers gave about 240,000 hours to over 200 nonprofits. Its 3,511 stewards raised £700,000; Oxfam fielded 2,500 volunteers and WaterAid 700.²²¹ The festival also reported over £3.7 million in charitable payments that year.²²¹

Roskilde takes the model furthest. It is a nonprofit run by The Roskilde Festival Charity Society, gives its surplus to humanitarian and cultural causes (457 million DKK donated since 1972), and runs on about 27,000 volunteers for more than 130,000 participants (official, 2026).²³⁴

US camping festivals run the same trade. Bonnaroo's C'roo volunteer program, as described on its support site (as of November 2026 the page redirects, so check current terms), asks for three six-hour shifts and an on-site training session; volunteers get a wristband for when they are off shift, a car camping pass for the volunteer campgrounds, a T-shirt and a meal token after each shift.²³⁵ The page does not mention a deposit.

In New England

Boston Calling and Cambridge. After Boston Calling moved to the Harvard Athletic Complex in Allston in 2017, its sound crossed the Charles into Cambridge; complaints fell in 2018 and again in 2019 after the festival changed its sound team and monitoring.²³⁶²³⁷ The full account, including the extra foot traffic Harvard Square businesses reported, is in Can you hear Boston Calling from Cambridge?.

Newport and the spending study. A 2012 study commissioned by Newport Festivals Foundation estimated that Newport Jazz and Folk brought about $5.09 million in direct spending to Rhode Island (estimate, commissioned).²³⁸ The earlier University of Rhode Island estimates and the state's 2023 figures are in New England.

Newport's sustainability recognition. In July 2023, Governor McKee recognized Newport Festivals Foundation for cutting single-use water bottles, bags and straws, recycling, working with local vendors, tackling food waste, and pushing attendees toward bikes, walking, water taxis and carpools. The announcement gave no measured figures.⁸

Elsewhere in the world

• UK: The Pop Code and the 28-day permitted development rule shape where and how often festivals happen; Glastonbury's fallow years are tied to the farm.^227230220
• Denmark: Roskilde's deposit cups and nonprofit model are the reference points for reuse and charity festivals.²¹⁷²³⁴
• US: Permits run through town planning boards, county governments and city parks departments, as Woodstock 50 and Electric Zoo showed.²²⁹²³¹ Impact studies lean on multiplier totals and tax take; UK studies tend to report business income and jobs.

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