The Fallout of Festival Season

Image taken at Reading Festival

What August's Festivals Tell Us About the State of Circular Fashion

August is festival month in the UK, fields across the country fill with tents, wellies and questionable outfit choices. Bring on September, those same fields are left picking up the pieces. This year was no exception. Reading Festival alone drew a sold-out crowd of over 90,000 for headliners including Charli XCX, Fontaines D.C. and Florence + The Machine, and the music delivered. The clean-up afterwards, had rather a few less hands to tidy up.

Aerial and ground-level footage from Reading's campsite this year showed the now-familiar scene: abandoned camping chairs, inflatable mattresses, clothing and drinks bottles scattered across the grounds. One attendee's viral clip of the mess prompted a wave of frustration online, with commentators noting how normalised it's become to assume "someone else" will clear up after festival-goers. When did everyone get so lazy or rather so entitled?

The scale is significant. UK festivals are estimated to generate hundreds of tonnes of waste each year, with recent events producing over 700 tonnes of total waste including roughly 71 tonnes of abandoned tents alone. Reading Borough Council's own figures show over 70 tonnes of tents were left behind in 2024 -though the trajectory isn't all bad news: council minutes from 2023 record a 31% drop in greenhouse gas emissions against the 2019 baseline, 77% of waste sent for recycling, zero waste to landfill, and a 28-tonne year-on-year reduction in abandoned tents. By 2025, organisers report 87% of festival waste was recycled. The figures aren’t out as yet for 2026 as the tidy up has only just commenced - as has the washing pile in my house - being a parent to a teenage attendee who i am happy to report bought all of her belongings and rubbish home with her as well as an abandoned blanket!

But it’s not just tents - it’s outfits too!

Timed almost perfectly alongside this year's festival, the Guardian ran a piece worth reading alongside this update: 'It gives Shein': how did polyester become the world's most-hated material? It reports that "polyester" has become gen Z's go-to insult on TikTok shorthand for anything cheap-looking or uncool and traces that back to a genuine backlash against the fabric itself: complaints about how it looks, how it feels to wear, and growing unease about the chemicals used in dyeing and finishing synthetic fabrics leaching onto skin. It's not purely aesthetic either as we all know in this community- polyester is fossil-fuel derived, doesn't biodegrade, and sheds microplastics in the wash, all of which is fuelling a countertrend of shoppers actively seeking out cotton, linen and hemp alternatives.

The retail data backs this up only partially. According to analysis cited in the Guardian’s piece, polyester use is actually down at Nike but up at both Urban Outfitters and Zara year-on-year, while product names featuring the word "cotton" have jumped sharply at both retailers, suggesting brands are marketing around the material more than they're changing it. As one analyst quoted in the piece put it, mass-market fashion remains structurally tied to polyester to protect margins, even as it leans into natural-fibre messaging to court "material-conscious" shoppers. However retailer beware Greenwashing fines are no joke.

Retailers foregrounding cotton content in product names and marketing even while their overall materials mix stays largely synthetic is precisely the kind of practice regulators are now targeting. Selective impact disclosure, such as highlighting a garment's organic cotton content while concealing that the fabric underwent heavy chemical bleaching or non-compliant synthetic finishing, is explicitly being outlawed under 2026 EU rules. BlueKaktus

The fines are already landing. Shein was fined roughly $1.16 million by the Italian Competition Authority in August 2025 for misleading and overstated sustainability claims, following a €40 million fine from France's competition authority the month before. H&M has also faced scrutiny on this front, settling for $3 million in the US. And the regulatory net is tightening fast: the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive brings enforcement from September 2026, requiring that any claim implying an environmental benefit on labels, hangtags, websites or marketing be specific, verifiable and backed by recognised evidence, with generic claims, vague language and self-created eco-labels explicitly banned. In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act now allows the Competition and Markets Authority to fine fashion brands up to 10% of global annual turnover for misleading green claims. Greenwashing Fashion: How Brands Sell Sustainability | Earth Day +2

For an industry currently leaning hard on the word "cotton" to signal quality and conscience, that's a meaningful shift. A product name isn't a materials breakdown, and from this September, brands won't be able to treat it as one. Think we all know a company that can help with this Our Fashion Fix and Brand Conscience ( CottonConscience | ESA Space Solutions) and our very our platform Ask Miranda® ( Ask Miranda — Brand Conscience)

That gap between perception and production is exactly what plays out at a festival campsite. Festival fashion has become its own fast-fashion category, and per the Guardian's own reporting nine out of ten dresses on Shein's site checked for the piece were majority polyester. It's the fabric equivalent of the £20 tents : bought for one look, one weekend, then discarded.

The missing link: why aren't attendees taking responsibility?

If the infrastructure and messaging exist, why the mess? A few consistent patterns emerge across research on the issue.

The first is a genuine misconception. A Festival Republic customer survey found the single biggest reason people gave for leaving their tent behind was a belief it would be donated to charity a myth campaigners have been trying to bust for years, since in reality up to 90% of abandoned kit ends up in landfill or incineration rather than reaching anyone in need.

The second is price psychology and this is where the tent problem and the outfit problem genuinely are a BIG issue. Tents costing as little as £20–£25 have effectively been marketed as disposable, and it's overwhelmingly younger festival-goers buying these ultra-cheap tents who are most likely to walk away from them. It's the same mechanism the Guardian piece describes in fashion: when an item is cheap enough, it stops feeling like "gear" or "clothing" and starts feeling like packaging. Essentially it holds no VALUE.

The third, and arguably the most fixable, is the assumption that the mess is already accounted for. There's a widespread belief that clean-up costs are baked into the ticket price, so leaving things behind isn't seen as littering at all more like tidying up, just for someone else to finish. Psychologically, people rarely describe their own abandoned tent, or their worn-once outfit, as waste; they "left" it, or they'll "sort it out later."

That's the real gap: it's not that attendees don't care about the environment in the abstract, it's that the consequences are invisible at the point of purchase and at the point of departure.

So if you want to go to a festival next year and learn some lessons from the mess this year - save this article as the below is the good stuff!

One of the more structural fixes on show this year came from Decathlon, whose "No Tent Left Behind" scheme returned for another summer- first started in 2023. The scale of the problem it's targeting is stark: UK festivals generate around 25,800 tonnes of waste every year, with as many as 250,000 tents abandoned in fields each summer, and more than half of festival-goers admit to treating their tent as a disposable item.

The 2026 mechanics are simple: buy any Decathlon-brand tent between 23 May and 6 September 2026, use it, then return it by the deadline to receive the full value back as a gift card, or up to 50% in cash, provided you're a Decathlon Member. Returned tents are assessed, cleaned and resold through Decathlon's Second Life programme rather than being landfilled.

The Repairium: fixing kit on-site

The genuinely new addition this year was the Reading Repairium and yes, this is where I get to be a slightly proud parent. My daughter's festival trolley gave out on route to their pitch, and the volunteers there had it fixed and rolling again within minutes. Saved the day, and the walk back to the car. They also located her lost vintage cowboy boot that fell out of the said trolley!

This was the first-ever Reading Repairium, run by volunteers from Berkshire Repair Cafés, offering on-the-spot repairs for damaged camping gear, clothing and everyday essentials, staffed by over 30 skilled volunteers across the four days of the festival. Items ranged from broken air beds and snapped tent poles to ripped outfits, faulty torches, damaged bags and glasses - plus, evidently, trolleys.

As a first-year pilot, Reading doesn't yet have a published tally of items saved but the model has proven itself elsewhere. Boomtown's equivalent scheme has helped drive a 94% increase in recycling rates and seen 89% of tents taken home rather than abandoned, with national coverage on BBC One's Breakfast Show reaching an estimated five million viewers.

So was this years festival season better or worse than last year?

The challenge for me feels behavioural and it spans from the tent pegs all the way to the outfits. Closing the gap between what people believe happens to what they leave behind, and what actually does.

What's your opinion, is education the missing link, or do schemes like Decathlon's buy-back and the Repairium prove that removing friction matters more than raising awareness? And is the gen Z "polyester" backlash a genuine shift in buying habits, or just a taste signal that hasn't caught up with what's actually in their shopping basket?

I’ll leave that with you - whilst i get my teenager to scrape the mud off her wellies and do her washing!

#SustainableFashion #CircularEconomy #FestivalWaste #Repair #OurFashionFix