“After three days of rain and mud, many just walked off and left clothing, sleeping bags and other items,” says Maria O’Donovan, an archaeologist at Binghamton University in New York who has led an excavation project on the site to identify the site of key locations at the festival.

Surprisingly little remains of this huge sea of waste, but O’Donovan and her team found a distinctive smear of trash downhill, and soil patterns typically expected from an industrial-scale removal using heavy equipment.

It seems astonishing that an event so steeped in the environmental movement at the time should leave an environmental scar that is still visible 50 years later. But as one of the first big music festivals, Woodstock set the tone for many of those that would try to follow in its footsteps.

Jumbo problem

Waste is now one of the biggest problems facing modern music festivals. Each of the major music festivals in the US, such as Coachella, Stagecoach and Desert Trip, generate around 100 tonnes of solid waste every day, while an estimated 23,500 tonnes of waste are produced by music festivals in the UK each year – about the same as weight as 78 fully loaded Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets. To put that in perspective – the average household in the UK produces around one tonne of waste a year.

Most festivals employ armies of litter pickers to help clean up at the end of their events, and enormous waste management operations swing into action once the revellers go home. But Graca Gonçalves, a former environmental scientist at Nova University of Lisbon and one of the organisers of the Andanças Festival in Castelo de Vide, Portugal says the growing use of disposable plastics at festivals has been behind many of the waste problems large festivals struggle with. Drinks and food are sold in disposable plastic cups, bottles and food containers, along with enormous amounts of plastic cutlery. Festivalgoers discard wristbands, fancy dress clothing, glitter, ponchos, toiletries, sleeping bags, mats and tents all made from polymers that can persist in the environment for decades if not centuries.