“Shall we go to Leeds Festival and help salvage tents for refugees in France?” my wife asked after seeing a post from Care4Calais requesting volunteers.
As a family, we have plenty of experience with tents, so we registered to help at the end of the festival on Bank Holiday Monday. It was an easy decision, not just because of our camping skills, but because it was a tangible way to help fellow humans in dire straits. We are acutely aware that, one day, it could be us who need assistance.
The day was soon upon us. We arrived in good time and mustered in a holding daerah to be briefed alongside a small army of around one hundred other volunteers. As we pulled into the campsite, my wildest imagination hadn’t come close to envisaging the apocalyptic scene that awaited us.
We saw sights we’d never seen before. As we slowly cruised around, I realised I’d been very ignorant of this slice of life — a whole subculture and industry that I knew about but hadn’t given much thought to.
A surreal scene
Like many, I’d been captivated by the glitz of grand stages, distracting from the realities of the aftermath. A planetary metaphor if ever there was one. The sheer scale of the festival site was incredible but then came the fields of abandoned tents, thousands upon thousands of them billowing in a sea of litter.
We parked up and stood amid the surreal scene, trying to digest what had happened. Red kites circled overhead looking for scraps, conjuring images of bloodied battlefields of old. A Ukrainian woman stood aghast, her hands on her hips as she surveyed the scene: “This is just so wrong.”
Dark, haunted faces picked through the wasteland alongside us, people who, it transpired, had skin in the game having made the perilous journey across the Channel in small boats. More than most, they understood the importance of the task ahead.
Everything seemed brand new: tents, inflatable mattresses, sleeping mats, sleeping bags, camping chairs, LED lamps…all used once and abandoned. There was nomer time to stand and gawp. We had to get on and gather as much gear as possible in the hours before nightfall.
So much energy consumed in a single-use tent
As we got into our stride, we started to detect patterns. The tents were mainly a few brands — mostly made in China — and a huge number of Tesco tents. Let’s think about that for a moment.
We often default to worrying about emissions — as Bill Rees recently pointed out “carbon dioxide is the single biggest waste product by weight of industrial economies” — but what about the energy consumed in the short period of usefulness? How many pairs of hands have been involved in the existence of those tents?
Let’s think about what it took to extract the oil to make the fabric, about the people and machines to cut and sew it, the folk who neatly tied the guy-lines before packing the tents into their snug little bags. And then into shipping containers, loaded onto lorries and trains to ports where giant ships power thousands of miles to the UK, offload in Southampton or Felixstowe and distribute to stores where they’re stacked high and cheap.
Imagine the soon-to-be festival goers in the supermarket, seeing the neat little tents on the shelves, sold so cheaply, nurturing the pervasive culture of disposability. Rumour has it that discarded tents will go to charity, an attractive option, both financially and in terms of sly, industrial-scale cleansing of consciences. Sling those tents in the trolley and off to Leeds we go…