Sustainable Festivals: Beach Break Live

Fellow trendspotters Springwise recently wrote an article about this summer’s Beach Break Live festival in Corwall, and it looks as though it’s going to be a breath of fresh air in the rather sordid history of summer festivals. They report:

Most summer music festivals take a large toll on the environment. Mountains of waste, car parks, food from afar, diesel generators for electricity, tidal waves of plastic water bottles, flying in international artists… In an effort to do less harm, several music festivals around the world have started putting ‘carbon neutral’ practices into place, offsetting the carbon dioxide they’ve caused to enter the atmosphere.

A new British student festival is aiming to do more than become carbon neutral. Beach Break Live, a three day event in Cornwall taking place from June 11-14, has taken a number of steps to have an environmentally and socially positive impact. The micro festival (just 3,000 visitors) has organized cheap bus travel for students from their universities, keeping road transit and parking to a minimum. Beach Break Live takes place during a mid-week outside the peak holiday season, which means it’s providing the local economy with a boost during downtime. Furthermore, most food and drink will be sourced locally: beef and lamb from neighbourhood farms, beer from Skinner’s, a Cornwall brewery, bottled water from a Cornish spring, seafood from Cornish waters, and even toilet paper from a nearby paper recycling plant.

All of this sounds very promising, so let’s hope others take notice and attempt to emulate this innovative strategy. Maybe festivals will finally be pleasant, clean places to be, rather then the sweltering dungheaps they currently tend to degenerate into.   

Beach Break Live