ANNA HART THE HYPE

Banning plastic bottles at this year’s Glastonbury was a step in the right direction, but travellers can accelerate industry-wide change

One of the most reliable barometers of progress is this: we find ourselves completely dismayed by something we used to do. Two years ago, I was the sort of traveller who thought nothing of downing plastic water bottles in hotel rooms, or doing a forearm shelf-sweep of posh Molton Brown toiletries into my soapbag, or scoffing a plasticwrapped Pret salad with plastic cutlery in the departures lounge. Today, I’m ashamed I unthinkingly possessed such plasticky habits. But shame is the surest sign of change. We can’t have personal growth or societal progress without twinges of dismay. Not all shame is positive, of course, but sometimes, shame is a sign that we’re a better person than we were five minutes, five months or five years ago. So next time you taste this particular flavour of shame, lick it up.

Last weekend I was one of the 200,000 lucky souls at the first ever plastic-free Glastonbury Festival. For the 2019 event, organiser Emily Eavis banned single-use plastic water bottles and cups from the site. At the 2017 festival, more than one million bottles of plastic water bottles were bought, consumed and tossed. This is a shameful statistic, especially for a festival that has always been about opening hearts and minds.

Instead of forking out for a tiny bottle of water, people nursed their Hydro Flasks, Ecoffee cups, and filled up from pitchers of water, taps around the site, and smiling WaterAid staffers offering refills.

It was my ears that first registered the transformation. Walking home after Stormzy’s seminal set, it hit me that I was no longer ploughing through plastic bottles to my tent. The

silence was blissful, and, with no offence intended to the Cure, Neneh Cherry and the rest of the line-up – this plastic-free silence was the sweetest sound my ears heard all weekend.

After the event, Eavis acknowledged that the absence of plastic litter encouraged revellers to have a bit more respect for the land in general, in vague accordance with the broken windows theory. If you’re inhabiting a plasticstrewn dump for a weekend, you treat it like a rubbish dump, but only a loser tosses a can on to a pristine stretch of grass.

Glastonbury’s ban on plastics will have an impact that reaches far beyond eliminating a million bottles for one sole weekend in year. For five days, 200,000 people lived a virtually plasticfree existence, and will have returned to reality with eyes that scan for single-use plastics, and refuse them. Once you get your “plastic eyes”, you can’t unsee the waste, and what once looked normal seems shameful.

Immediately after Glastonbury, I went to Miami for a travel trade show, and was dismayed to find bottles of Crystal Geyser in every hotel room. When quizzed, one American hotelier said he’d love to eliminate plastics from his New York hotel, but that among business travellers, refilled glass bottles of filtered water could be construed as “cheap”.

But Brian De Lowe, cofounder of Proper Hotels, told me he’d picked up on an aversion to single-use plastics from his guests and was eliminating them entirely. Among his guests, plastic water bottles in hotel rooms now look as outdated as a trouser press.

Talking to hoteliers about single-use plastics made me realise that it’s not enough to glare at bottles of Evian in hotel rooms. As individual travellers, we can accelerate progress on plastic reduction by requesting jugs of refilled filter water in hotel rooms and travelling with a LifeStraw filter bottle, if the tap water isn’t drinkable. But the most important step? Talking to the people behind the desks, the people who are making the big business decisions based on what they think we, the travellers, want.

It’s time to readjust our own

This plastic-free silence was the sweetest sound I heard all weekend

concept of luxury, and make our travel preferences known to the industry that caters for us. Because if I know one thing about the travel trade, it is this: it responds to the tastes of society. Hoteliers, airlines and tour operators live or die by how rapidly they respond to consumer demands, and they need to be plugged into the zeitgeist, or we’ll direct our tastes and dreams elsewhere.

If enough travellers stir up some shame, embarrassment and dismay about single-useplastics as we travel, we can change things for the better.

To read more articles by Anna Hart, see telegraph.co.uk/ travel/team/anna-hart

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