Shambala is free from disposable plastics! This is how it works:
1. The Pioneering ‘Bring a Bottle’ Campaign
How we are doing it:
- A site-wide ban on the sale of bottled water (and other drinks) at the festival
- Asking all festival-goers, crew and artists to bring a re-usable water bottle
- Making it easier to get fresh clean water by installing many more taps across the site.
- Working with charity FRANK Water to provide free chilled and filtered water on the main bars and at their water refill points
- Selling our own beautiful, Shambala-branded stainless steel bottleswith donations from each on site sale going to either FRANK Water or the Bansang Hospital Appeal. Our bottles are manufactured by RAW Foundation, an organisation who do incredible work tackling the single use plastic problem. These bottles can be ordered in advance of the festival and picked up on arrival. Order yours HERE.
2. Re-usable glasses at all the bars
- All plastic glasses on the bars will be re-usable!
- A levy of £1.50 is charged on the very first glass/drink you have, and then subsequent glasses are exchanged free of charge, or a token can be taken if you don’t want another drink at that moment. The levy is to make sure they come back and are reused!
- All other types of serve ware (e.g. hot drinks) will be 100% compostable.
3. No disposable hot drink cups sold
- Bring your own reusable cup or mug from home – plastic, bamboo or metal (no ceramic or glass for safety reasons please!)
- Buy a beautiful Shambala enamel mug in advance (or onsite from any cafe serving hot drinks while stocks last).
- Or grab one from a Food Trader, and use it through the weekend (and forever).
Why we are designing out disposables plastics?
Disposable plastics is causing mass-scale pollution of rivers and oceans, is a risk to wildlife and human health, and is a very resource-inefficient way to consume generally. The phenomenon of buying bottled water is a perfect expression of how ridiculous and disconnected to environmental cause-and-effect modern consumer society has become.
Bottled water is 2000 times as expensive as tap water, and often lower in quality, has a huge ecological burden, creates waste which endangers ecosystems, pollutes our own food chain with tiny plastic nodules and compared to tap water represents a massive contribution to green house gasses through production and transportation.
At Shambala we have decided we need to tackle this issue head-on, and while doing so make our festival experience cleaner as much of the waste thrown on the ground is pint glasses and bottles. We can also divert budgets from landfill taxes to creativity. Please work with us to make this a success as we feel our way through the first year of an ambitious change!