This campaign wants people to pay £100 to bring a tent to Leeds Festival
Kathryn Hodgkinson, who owns a cafe in Newcastle, was shocked to see photos in the national media showing thousands of tents that had been abandoned by festiver-goers - many of which will end up in landfill sites.
How tents left behind at Leeds Festival will help the city's homelessThe problem was acute at both Leeds and Reading Festivals, and is thought to be due to a 'myth' that all of the camping gear will be recycled by organisers.
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Hide AdSchemes have been run whereby ticket-holders could donate their unwanted items to homeless charities, but in reality these organisations can only reclaim a small percentage of the tents.
Kathryn's son was one of the campers who left his tent behind at Bramham Park, and she believes a returnable 'bond' of £100 would prevent the issue recurring next year.
She has now launched a Change.org petition to revoke Leeds Festival's licence until they introduce a deposit scheme.
How to get tickets for Leeds Festival 2019"Tents being left at festivals is a huge waste of resources and an environmental problem. There is a misconception that charities can use the tents, but many are damaged and end up in landfill.
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Hide Ad"We need to educate festival-goers as to why this is not acceptable and make it much harder for festivals to condone this happening. A very simple solution would be to take a healthy tent bond on entry, such as £100; this could be returned upon sight of the tent at the end and if not collected it can be donated to environmental charities, This should simply be a term of the licence."
Leeds charity Community Kitchen was one of 200 voluntary organisations invited to the Leeds Festival site to 'salvage' items such as tents, sleeping bags, cooking utensils and chairs.
Scout and Guide groups, Sea Cadets, a refugee charity and an earthquake relief appeal also visited, as well as over 900 individual salvagers. Their efforts prevented around 30 tonnes of leftover items at both festivals from going to waste.
They collected reusable items such as tents and sleeping bags for organisations including local Scouts and Girl Guides, Sea Cadets, help for refugees, Lombok Earthquake Relief and residents associations such as WADRA.