There are various stages one experiences when repeatedly cleaning up after what is essentially a massive house party weekend after weekend. First there is the initial shock at the vast scale of the task at hand and quantity of “waste”. This has been known to bring the odd eco-warrior to tears and can even be a point at which some people say “Never again!” to the job.

The next stage is interesting, the more events you clean up after, the faster and more efficient you get, knowing what needs doing when, how best to do it and how long it will take. This is where you take pride in your work, for example just how quickly it is possible to fill a 40 yard skip. This is where the next stage turned up and slapped us in the face. We managed to fill a 40 yard skip in 2 hours, full to the brim with tents, sleeping bags and camping chairs.

That’s when it really struck us, how can we take pride in throwing so much perfectly good stuff in a skip?! How blind had we become to what we were doing to triumphantly stand on top of a full skip like it was the top of Everest.

In 2015, we began taking time out of our festival work schedules to salvage tents and sleeping bags, and by 2016 we had set up a registered charity and started to set up links with other charities who could help to redistribute the salvaged items.

2 years on, we have worked with dozens of organisations and charities to collect thousands of perfectly good sleeping bags and tents and redirect them from incineration to where they’re needed most. From refugee aid and homeless support to Scout groups and artists, the amount of people that can benefit from the abandoned items of festival-goers is astonishing.