Throwaway society to blame for this horror

THESE shocking photos are an inexcusable indictment of our throwaway society – ugly littering on a large scale. Awareness of the senseless damage from plastic is higher than it’s ever been, so people have to recognise these abandoned tents for what they are: plastic pollution.

Perhaps festival-goers don’t realise that most of these tents do not go to charities – and organisations that do collect them are able to take only a tiny percentage.

The real problem is the throwaway society we live in. Big companies have flooded us with cheap, plastic goods such as tents that are not worth anything after one or two uses.

Solutions lie in educating festivalgoers. They need to understand that this is polluting, that it is a huge waste of resources and a massive problem for the environment.

They need to think about buying better quality tents and being sure to take all waste home with them.

You actually save money in the long term if you buy a tent that you can use for years instead of a cheap one that lasts a single summer.

Most tents cannot be recycled anyway because they are made from layers of materials that can’t be separated.

Their only possible chance of having a second life is if they can be reused by someone else but if a particular tent is of really poor quality, that’s unlikely to happen.

Some festivals do make it clear to their customers that leaving any kind of waste behind is not acceptable and this is a message they all should adopt.

They should be told at the very beginning, from the moment that they order their tickets, that waste will not be tolerated.

Friends of the Earth supports plastic reduction across the board.

As a society, we need to use plastic only for the most essential reasons and to achieve this we need Government action.

The move to introduce charges for plastic bags brought about an 83 per cent drop in their usage in the first two years.

We would like to see a moving away from short-lived plastic products of any kind and if we could stop this level of pollution, it would be music to my ears.