Why Do We Trash Our Green Sensibilities When We Attend Outdoor Events?

Is there something in the air at outdoor festivals that makes people abandon all common eco-sense and instead tap into their inner swine? On the heels of Great Britain's "Recycle Week," which set out to inspire the masses to embrace the concept of being more eco-responsible, something altogether oinky went down in southwest England. Apparently, when vast throngs of people assemble in one location, trails of garbage are inevitably left behind. Attendees of 2009's Glastonbury Music Festival may have finally gone home, but their presence remains on the 600 acre Worthy Farm in the form of 1,650 tons of scattered waste which will take until August 2009 to clean up. A team of 1,200 volunteers and 500 paid staff are now tackling the unpleasant task of sorting through and collating a vast collection of materials littering concert grounds.

The Glastonbury Festival is clearly committed to limiting its environmental impact by employing the following eco-friendly measures:

• distributing 100% unbleached cotton program bags to all attendees
• dispensing compostable cups, plates and wood cutlery made from locally sourced, sustainably harvested trees
• requiring that food vendors compost all food waste
• exclusively selling beverages made with fair trade coffee, tea and sugar
• selling t-shirts dyed with vegetable-based pigments and printed with non-pvc inks
• relying on renewable power (such as solar and wind) and low energy solutions to power lights and sound

Additionally, well over 15,000 clearly labeled recycling bins -- either for wet/dry recyclables, non-recyclables and e-waste -- were located virtually everywhere on the concert grounds and the Glastonbury Festival even employed green police to enforce their zero waste aspirations. Still, for some reason, people pitched containers of food and quite an assortment of personal possessions wherever they could and also felt it perfectly appropriate to answer the call of nature almost anywhere but in the port-a-potties located on site.

To give you an idea of the sheer volume of junk that concert goers abandoned at last year's music festival, here are the highlights of Glastonbury 2008:

• 400 tons of wood
• 193 tons of "compostable material,"
• 66 tons of scrap metal
• 54 tons of cans and plastic bottles,
• 41.76 tons of cardboard,
• 11.2 tons of discarded tents, clothing and sleeping bags
• 10 tons of dense plastic
• 9.12 tons of glass
• 0.264 tons of batteries
• 0.25 tons of plastic sheeting

While workers were able to recycle 863.32 tons (48%) of the material left behind in 2008, it is still baffling to me that so much was thrown away. What happens to the human mind when music, alcohol and the summer solstice mix -- can this chemical imbalance explain such inexcusable irresponsibility? Please feel free to hazard a guess, because I'm at a loss. When you attend special outdoor events or music festivals, do you suffer from a temporary lapse in sanity that causes you to uncontrollably drop garbage at your feet? Have you seen this type of behavior in person? Have you ever tried to advise offenders to do the right thing and clean up after themselves?