Woodstock Music Festival
Hi everyone!
In my last post I talked about plastic pollution caused by the waste left behind from music festivals and concerts. In this post I will be talking about the iconic woodstock music festival and the enduring legacy of waste that it left behind.
The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was a rock music festival held in 1969. It has since gone down in the history books as such an iconic event that some even consider it to be the most famous rock concert and festival ever held. Before the event, no one knew just how big this festival would be, so it was absolutely overwhelming when over 400,000 people fled to the venue that only had the capacity for 50,000.
However, while this music festival left behind a great legacy for rock music and music festivals in general, once all the festivities were over, the festival and its audience left something else behind – mountains of trash.
Mario O’Donovan, an archaeologist at Binghampton University in New York, who lead an excavation project on the site said that “after three days of rain and mud, many just walked off and left clothing, sleeping bags and other items”. The trashcans that were provided by the organisers for the event quickly reached its full capacity and started to overflow resulting in mountains of trash piled up all around the venue. Not only that, many of the bins that were set up tipped over and used as tools for people to sit on.
Due to the heavy rains that occurred throughout the event, the grounds were all muddy and a lot of the trash got buried into the soil. According to an article from the Times print archive, there was an estimated 1,400 tons of garbage produced at the event and half of this amount still remained in the muck of the Winston farm days after. Charles Shaw, director of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency said that the 500-600 tons of garbage that had been collected had already been dumped into the town landfill. He also mentioned that “a lot of the trash could’ve been recycled but the crash of people combined with the rain and mud made that nearly impossible. Anything recyclable that was contaminated by mud had to be thrown out”. By the end of the event, the amount of garbage that had been recycled was a mere 280 pounds of tin, half a ton of glass and 15 tons of cardboard.
Mr Groneman, a spokesman for the state Department of environmental conservation, even said that “there is no imminent environmental danger”. However, with the amount of research and knowledge we have acquired over the years since this event, we now know that the amount of waste that had been produced at this one event alone, would have had a major impact on our environment in terms of pollution. The amount of rubbish that was left and buried in the mud of the Woodstock Festival in 1969 was so much that some of it can still be found on the site today.
While the Woodstock Music Festival is seen as the one that started it all, and the one that many music festivals of today look up to, it is also seen as a learning point for many modern festivals who are working to become more sustainable environmentally friendly by trying to minimize its waste.
References:
The people fighting the war on waste at music festivals. (n.d.). Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190627-the-people-fighting-the-war-on-waste-at-music-festivals
Press, T. (n.d.). Tons of Garbage Remain Mired In the Mud at Site of Woodstock (Published 1994). Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/23/nyregion/tons-of-garbage-remain-mired-in-the-mud-at-site-of-woodstock.html
History.com Editors. (2019, August 15). 5 Reasons Why Woodstock ’69 Became Legendary. Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.history.com/news/woodstock-memorable-moments