Music festivals aren’t generally known for their green credentials. Providing food, water, power and sanitation for thousands of people requires a lot of energy. Come going home time, the apocalyptic scene of abandoned tents, rubbish, and discarded wellies will be familiar to all festival goers. So what’s going on here? And is it really possible to run a ‘green’ festival?

In the words of Bjork, it’s all about human behavior

Some economists say we make decisions by weighing up the potential costs and benefits. In this case, your average festival goer has decided that the effort needed to pick up all their stuff isn’t outweighed by the benefit of leaving a clean campsite behind. After all, you’re leaving in four days, so where’s the incentive to bear the cost of the effort involved?

Well what about the incentive to hang onto expensive and perfectly useable camping gear? An economist might call this a ‘sunk cost’ - that’s one you’ve already made, and so cannot be recovered. They think that what you’ve already paid for no longer counts in the decision making process. You can’t take the tent back once you’ve used it, so all you care about is the pain of lugging it back to the car after four days of no sleep.

Other economists would disagree. They’d say human beings are 'loss averse'. So abandoning your tent, which is a financial loss, and would mean having to buy a new one for next year, is less appealing than carrying it for a bit. This is shown by the plenty of people who do tidy up, but any seasoned festival goer will tell you that by this point everyone is far too tired to be thinking rationally about the prospective costs and losses. And if we’re really so loss averse, why doesn’t everybody do this?

Either way, there’s enough waste and stuff left behind to prove enough people feel the benefits of leaving stuff behind outweigh any losses they’re making. Not a particularly ‘green’ way of going about things.