A petition calling on major retailers to stop marketing tents as ‘festival tents’ has collected over 110,000 signatures.

Back in May, more than 60 festivals urged stores to change their advertising, saying the label ‘festival tents’ implies they are single-use items.

The Association of Independent Festivals said it estimates 250,000 tents get left behind at festivals in the UK each year, with the average tent equivalent to 8,750 straws of single-use plastic.

The 38degrees petition has been running through the summer. Addressed to Argos, Amazon, Sports Direct and Decathalon, it states three demands:

To stop marketing tents as ‘festival tents’ on the basis this encourages single-use

To state on all packaging tents should be used multiple times

To only sell tents with sufficient quality “to last longer than a single muddy weekend”

Asked about the petition, a spokesperson for Argos told TheFestivals: “We offer a variety of tents and they are all sold with a bag to encourage re-use.”

Sports Direct and Decathalon have yet to respond to a request for comment, and Amazon declined to comment.

When the Take Your Tent Home campaign was launched back in May, the Association of Independent Festivals said 36 per cent of tents left at festivals are bought from either Argos or Tesco.

CEO Paul Reed said: “We call upon major retailers to stop marketing and selling tents and other camping items as essentially single-use, and profiting from disposable culture.

“AIF launches this campaign to raise awareness and highlight abandoned tents as part of the single-use plastics problem. The message here is not to buy a more expensive tent – with a single tent carrying the same amount of plastic as more than 8,700 plastic straws, festival audiences can take positive action and reduce their carbon footprint simply by taking their tent home and reusing it, ensuring that it doesn’t become a single-use item this summer.”

Click here to sign the petition on 38degrees.

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– Six ways to recycle your tent after a festival

– Easy ways to repair your tent instead of throwing it away

Image credit: Jack Cheeseborough / (CC BY-SA 4.0)