HAIL THE LEAF
How one ancient tradition is looking to change the environmental impact of festivals forever “I’M NOT TRYING
MEET THE NEPALESE
metalhead equivalent of Greta Thunberg: Flower KC, director of Silence Festival in Kathmandu, is also the mastermind of t’pree, a project making entirely biodegradable plates from leaves that’s shaping the future of disposable products at music festivals. Unlike other biodegradable products that actually require industrial facilities to reduce them to compost, t’pree’s plates can be simply left on the ground and not only disintegrate into the soil, they leave behind high levels of nutrient compost which fertilises the land.
Having moved to the UK in 2008, Flower began to feel that many British music festivals were severely lacking in their attempts to cater for the environment – especially when it came to cleaning up after two or three days of carnage and considering what we’re all leaving behind for next year.
“I used to go to many festivals as a punter, spending three hours in the front row just to see the guys I’ve always seen on TV to see if they’re actually real or not,” Flower explains. “But every Monday morning, I’d walk around the site and tell my friends,
‘Can you believe this place?’ We come here for three days and we’ve destroyed it, it’s shaming. I feel so embarrassed to think that even though I haven’t made that mess, I feel part of it; I fund this place and this event and I feel responsible for people leaving so much mess. I think it’s so fucked up. I’ve just destroyed that land and it’ll take a while to become fertile again.”
The art of weaving and pressing these efficient leaf plates is a centuriesold tradition in Nepal, a technique used for serving offerings at household rituals. Generations of Nepalese communities have chosen the abundant leaves of the sal tree for their waterproof properties, which would only drop and decompose naturally if projects like t’pree didn’t collect them.
“When you’re using normal plates to serve offerings to guests, you’re eating a lot of things off that plate and from a ritual perspective, it’s not considered pure, whereas a leaf from a tree is considered pure and would usually be used for godly offerings. An event host doesn’t have to wash these dishes because you just put them in a bin and they turn into nutrient compost in 28 days. It’s making the best out of nature taught by generations of farmers; they put them in their kitchen gardens and grow vegetables because of these plates.”
Crafted by a workforce of local Nepalese women from disadvantaged families, some displaced by civil war, t’pree’s plate production is a growing business helping the less fortunate find their way out of poverty. Simultaneously keeping production costs and purchase prices down is a battle biodegradable companies often face, but to Flower, money is no object. His selfless projects to help his community in Nepal have also led to funding a massive programme to build 340 houses at the epicentre of a devastating earthquake near Kathmandu in 2015.
to make money at all. While the British pound is 140 times the Nepalese rupee, these workers make a pound a day but I say, ‘No, you take home £3 a day,’” Flower continues. “Now I’ve given disadvantaged mothers a job. The way I need to break their cycle of poverty would be to educate their children, so we invest in their schooling so they don’t have to make the plates, so they can be like me and dream like I did. I need to do this on a big scale because I need to build schools for this community; I’m sick of giving them a bowl of fish, I need to teach them how to fish and empower them so they don’t need me.”
Initially testing out their product at Flower’s Silence Festival back in Nepal, his 2,000-4,000 capacity event was the proving ground for a product that could revolutionise the environment left behind at larger UK and European festivals.
“I WALKED AROUND FESTIVAL SITES AND FELT SHAME”
“For the last two years, I’ve tried it out at my festival by buying the plates from the women myself and giving them for free to anybody selling anything at our festival. That way, when the vendors come back next year, they know what to expect. Even though I paid for the plates, I realised the beautiful thing was that there was no post-clean-up cost at all. I needed less than half the cleaning staff to put all the rubbish in a hole and a month later, they can spread it across the ground; I can come back next year making that soil more fertile than when we started.”
Having tested their leaf plates at Download and Bloodstock last year, tomorrow’s festival clean-up could look drastically different if this natural byproduct is used to benefit both British and worldwide festival sites.
“Out of 10 people I spoke to at Download this year, nine were blown away that there’s no glue involved and you can just leave them. The other one was the guy that’s off his face complaining about the headliner. In England, it’s even more blissful because moisture and water really enhances the speed of the decomposition of our leaf plates – it rains here all the fucking time!”
Harnessing an ancient, entirely sustainable tradition to save our hallowed festival grounds is one of the many steps we can all take to becoming environmentally friendly when 2020 festival season kicks in. Who says metal can’t be green as well as black?
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE T’PREE INITIATIVE, HEAD TO WWW.TPREE.COM