Glastonbury to ban plastic bottles at 2019 festival

Glastonbury festival is set to ban all plastic bottles from its grounds in 2019. One of the festival's organisers Emily Eavis told BBC6 Music that implementing the ban is an “enormous project” that they will be working on in the next year.

“It’s taking a lot of time to tackle it with all the different people we work with,” she said. “That’s the big project at the moment, to get rid of plastic bottles across the whole site."

Glastonbury is taking a “fallow year” in 2018 (though the Glastonbury Abbey Extravaganza will take place on Saturday 4th August) which has allowed the festival organisers to consider more radical changes for when the festival returns in 2019.


“I had this idea that we could do [in The Park] that would be really radical, and thought ‘that would be really cool,” she told NME. “It’s not the sort of thing you could do in a year off, but two gives us a bit of time.”

In 2014, Glastonbury made environmentally friendly, stainless steel bottles available to festival goers and set up numerous free water-kiosks throughout the grounds. In 2016, the festival also implemented optional stainless steel pint cups in order to reduce waste.

Glastonbury’s organisers have been attempting to make the festival more environmentally conscious in recent years through their “Love the farm ... leave no trace” campaign which actively discouraged visitors from littering, urinating on the land and leaving tents and equipment behind. Glastonbury has previously partnered with Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid and vocally encourages recycling on site. Despite that, clean-up after the 135,000 capacity festival in 2016 took two weeks to complete.

The planning process for 2019’s festival is already well in the works then. As reported in the Metro, last Wednesday’s NME awards the festival’s founder Michael Eavis revealed that “two or three” of the headliners will have never played the festival before.

Glastonbury is not the only place set to ban plastics in a bid to reduce environmental damage in the coming years. Ibiza authorities are set to ban disposable plastics in by 2020.

Take a look at DJ Mag's 17 photos that prove there's nowhere on earth like Glastonbury festival.