'Just like an apocalypse': Meet the Leeds Festival salvagers giving waste a second chance

From tents to toiletries and snacks to sleeping bags - the salvage operation begins to give these items a second chance.

An army of volunteers go on the hunt for items that can be used to support local charities and not for profit initiatives.

Volunteers apply to salvage at the festival months in advance, either as individuals or as groups, and they are often looking for items to support local charities and non-profit initiatives.

Leeds Festival organiser Festival Republic has said it has committed to increasing the sustainability of the festival. This year, they introduced The Meadow, an eco-friendly campsite which featured sustainability-focused talks, upcycling workshops and clothes swaps. Alongside this, there were several donation and recycling points across Bramham Park to encourage visitors to be mindful with their waste.

Once all campers have left the site, Festival Republic co-operate with salvagers to save items left behind.

Festival Republic decide when volunteers can access Bramham Park to salvage, what parts of the site they can access, and how long they can access it for.

This year, salvagers had four hours on the Bank Holiday Monday afternoon to clear as much of the Leeds Festival Orange Campsite as possible. Anything unclaimed by the end of the evening was then macerated and taken to landfill.

Jed Aitchison has salvaged at Leeds Festival since 2021. Over the past five years, he estimates that over £100,000 worth of items have been saved through volunteer effort. 2025 was a particular success as over 300 volunteer salvagers cleared clean reusable items from the site.

Jed said: “This is the fifth year I’ve gone and this is the first time in those five years that I’ve ever seen the campsite this clear at the end of a salvage effort.

“I don’t think I saw one unbroken tent - that means that every single working tent in the campsite we were allowed on had been successfully salvaged.”

This success is the result of extensive preparation.

Social media posts are made months in advance by individual volunteers such as Jed to encourage as many people to apply to salvage as possible.

Once groups are co-ordinated, they’ll need to provide their own salvaging equipment such as plastic gloves and high vis jackets, and they’ll need to ensure they have vehicles and storage facilities to transport and store items claimed from the festival.

For Tina Leslie, founder of Leeds-based period poverty charity Freedom4Girls, a successful salvage requires two key components: manpower and van power.

For the past two years, she’s assembled a team of volunteers to collect materials that can be used by Freedom4Girls and other community causes within their network.

According to Tina, salvaging is not for the faint-hearted as volunteers need to wade through a campsite full of waste.

She said: “It’s just like an apocalypse.”

“Everything’s strewn everywhere. It’s like you’ve had a big party and then everybody’s disappeared. It’s so weird.”

This year, alongside hygiene products such as toilet paper and wet wipes, they collected over 15kg worth of foodstuffs, and over 80 chairs and tents. Their criteria is simple – items collected should be clean and in good condition.

Tina said: “I said to my volunteers as long as they’re not dirty, it’s not damaged, and you would use it yourself, please salvage it.”

Many of these items will be immediately distributed to Freedom4Girls community members. Others will travel as far as Kenya to support the charity’s international work.

Another organisation in their second year of salvaging is Yum Community Fridge and Pantry. This year, Yum, which is part of grassroots community group Armley Action Team, collected over 40 crates worth of foodstuffs, toiletries, and even a pair of abandoned cowboy boots.

The Yum salvaging team focused their efforts on finding non-perishable food items such as crisps, cereal bars, and pot noodles as these will have a long shelf life in their community pantry. Yum members can already buy these items as part of their weekly pantry shop.

Alongside this, Yum volunteers also collected unopened toiletries such as shampoos, tissues, and sunscreens to give out for free to members of their network who need it.

According to Hailey Rochester-Argyle, operations director at Armley Action Team, the volume of items collected from salvaging has created a “fantastic” impact at Yum.

She said: “(Salvaging) makes a huge difference to us because the variety of what we offer can be spread out. It’s just a huge help to us.

“There’s now so much in the stock room.”

Yum Community Fridge and Pantry staff and volunteers usually fund the pantry through donations and their own money.

However, as salvaging creates a surplus in stock, funds can be diverted to support other Armley Action initiatives such as the Bundles Baby Shop.

Hailey said: “The big thing is that it reduces is costs.

“If we reduce our costs, we can put that money towards something else for the community.”

Though salvaging is a tough task, charities return year upon year because it is a chance to collect resources for communities and limit usable items going to landfill.

Jed hopes that other cities will see the positive impact of Leeds Festival salvaging and imitate a similar model at their festivals so that one day, nothing of value goes to waste.

He said: “No other city does it better than we do in terms of the scale and the breadth of the salvage effort in terms of taking user stuff, food bank stuff, camping stuff, broken stuff to be upcycled, the way we do”

“We need to evolve our society to not see festival waste as waste but as a resource to reuse.”