We take pride in being an Eco-Friendly Festival. Listed below are a few initiatives we take part in at EOTR.
Frank Water
Bristol charity, Frank Water and its FreeFill initiative have been a part of End of The Road since 2010, providing chilled, filtered drinking water to thirsty festival goers. Thanks to the continued support and generosity of the End of The Road audience and its crew, FreeFill at End of The Road has generated income to fund various clean water projects across the globe.
The communities they help are those living in remote, rural or hard to reach locations, are at risk of being left behind and have lived without state or central government assistance for generations. With its partners, Frank Water supports communities to claim their rights, apply for government funding and take ownership of their community, their health and development. For every £1 invested in water and sanitation, a further £4 is generated through increased productivity.
In addition to this, the reusable aspect of this scheme has also helped End of The Road in reducing recyclable waste. So if you’re attending this year, why not hop aboard the bandwagon, keep refreshed over the weekend and do your bit for charity too.
For more information on Frank Water and to see what they’re up to, visit their website here.
Drastic on Plastic
We have always been committed to reducing plastic products on-site, so we have signed up for the Drastic on Plastic campaign, with the aim of eliminating all single-use plastic at End of The Road. We strongly encourage everyone from customers to staff and artists to bring their own reusable bottles and coffee cups. There will be no plastic straws on-site, and water and soft drinks will only be served in cans.
We also provide drinking water at the many standpipes around the festival site, so there is no need to carry multiple heavy or large drinking vessels with you. Instead, you can bring a small refillable water bottle or purchase an official EoTR Chilly bottle from the festival merch shop or a Frank Water bottle from their stall. This also helps reduce the amount of discarded plastic on-site at the end of the festival.
In 2018 we cut our single-use plastic offering by 50% before introducing our Cup Scheme with Green Goblet in 2019, charging festival-goers £1 per new cup in order to reduce our single-use plastic consumption as part of AIF’s “Drastic On Plastic” campaign. With your help, we’ve now cut out single-use plastic almost completely.
After covering our costs, some of the profits from the scheme paid for a carbon audit of the festival carried out by Clean Earth Collective, to help decide how to best support environmental community projects around the world.
Following their advice, we used the remaining profits to offset our core operations with a Gold Standard Community based project, distributing energy-efficient cookstoves to the Shimoni community in Kenya. More information about the project can be found here. We have also further offset our audience travel with an investment in wind turbines in Costa Rica, more information on this initiative can be found here.
More on reusable cups
Choosing the best type of cup for your drinks involves many competing factors such as their ease of use, carbon footprint, ease of recycling and so on. At first thought, paper cups might be a winner as they are suitable for cold drinks and biodegradable, but they are single-use. A second option might be lightweight plastic cups which use a lot less energy in production and can be recycled, but they are also single-use.
As with previous years, we have chosen to hire reusable polypropylene cups which win on energy and CO2 emissions, provided each cup gets sufficient reuse. By hiring these cups, they get plenty of opportunities for reuse at many events all year round. Plus, polypropylene can be recycled at the end of its life.
Our cup scheme will be the same as last year. We will charge £1 for your first cup when you buy your first drink and you will then be issued with a clean cup – at no extra charge – every time you go back to the bar, as long as you have a cup to exchange. If you lose your cup, you will need to start the process all over again. When you’re done with your cup, please return it to the bar so it can be washed and reused at other events. You are welcome to bring your own reusable cup, however the bar staff reserve the right to refuse to use it if they deem it unfit for purpose.
Festival Wood – “Give Something Back”
Festival Wood is Trees For Life and A Greener Festival initiative to replant ancient woodland in Scotland; 100% of funds go towards a wide variety of restoration work including tree planting, rewilding, and reforesting the Highlands as all staff and coordinators are volunteers. We’ve supported them since 2013, but 2014 was the first year we asked you to help us along.
We give you the chance to ‘give something back’ to the environment by donating £5 when buying your End of The Road ticket. Last year, your overall donation resulted in 1843 trees being planted!
For more information on Trees for Life and to see how End of the Road punters have contributed so far, visit their website here.
Recycling
End of the Road Festival is dedicated to producing as little waste as possible and recycling wherever we can. We work with locally based Grist Environmental to make sure any waste generated on-site is dealt with in an environmentally friendly way. All our festival bins in the main arena and around the stages are combined waste bins for easy use, but these then get locally hand-sorted into various recyclable materials. We also ask for your assistance with this task so that we can all do our little bit to leave no trace. If you are staying on-site, please collect a clear plastic recycling bag from wristband exchange or one of the information points to use at your tent. The campsites have recycling collection points near most of the toilet blocks for your pre-sorted bags.
We strongly discourage leaving anything behind, but when this does happen, tents and other items that are in a good condition are collected and donated to refugee aid charities. If you have good quality items that you find you’re unable to take home, you can help in this process by dropping them off at wristband exchange as your leave. Please be careful about removing all your tent pegs as our beautiful festival site is used for sheep grazing during the rest of the year. On the subject of tents, we are now partnering with Vintents, who will supply our Boutique Camping area with upcycled canvas tents.
Travel
We have plenty of public transport options so you can leave the car at home. We work exclusively with National Express to provide return National Coaches from a variety of locations right into the festival site. You can also book a train ticket up to 12 weeks in advance and hop on a Shuttle Bus service from Salisbury Station and back. Find out more here.
Catering
As part of our Terms & Conditions, all caterers who trade at the festival are only able to use biodegradable cutlery and plates on site (which includes the Artist’s backstage). Any unused good food is collected by the charity Refugee Community Kitchen on Monday morning and is used at their kitchens in London and Calais. We also collect all the food scraps generated over the weekend and take them for composting. Furthermore, we request that all eggs are free-range, coffee is Fair Trade and meat is locally sourced so you’re always receiving good quality food and feeling ethically content about that morning breakfast bap.
Traders
Over 50% of our non-catering traders offer eco-friendly products and services ranging from recycled jewellery to vintage clothes so you know that little spending spree is as sustainable as it is fabulous.
Site Lighting & Power
All the lamps used on-site are low energy and we turn off the perimeter tower lights in the daytime. Load sharing generators are used across the festival, to make the best use of the fuel consumed on-site. We are also working with the Cranborne Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to help the Larmer Tree Estate gain International Dark Sky Reserve Status.
Nordic Wristbands
We work with Nordic Wristbands to produce the wristband that gets you in and around the festival site. Read here about how they effectively offset the polyester and plastics used in their wristbands and how that has made a significant impact in preserving critical forests.