Opening
1. Every year, the same scene plays out across Europe's festival fields.
2 . The music stops. The crowds leave. And behind them, scattered across hectares of flattened grass, lie thousands of abandoned tents.
3. Bright colours. Broken poles. Synthetic fabrics that will outlast everyone who ever slept in them.
4. It's one of the most visible — and most avoidable — environmental failures in the live events industry. And it starts with a simple question: what if the tent itself was part of the solution?
2 . The music stops. The crowds leave. And behind them, scattered across hectares of flattened grass, lie thousands of abandoned tents.
3. Bright colours. Broken poles. Synthetic fabrics that will outlast everyone who ever slept in them.
4. It's one of the most visible — and most avoidable — environmental failures in the live events industry. And it starts with a simple question: what if the tent itself was part of the solution?
The scale of the problem
The UK's festival industry alone generates an estimated 23,500 tonnes of waste annually. A significant portion is abandoned camping equipment — tents, sleeping bags, and groundsheets made almost entirely from plastic-derived materials.
Traditional festival tents are constructed from polyester, nylon, and fibreglass. They are cheap enough to be disposable, but durable enough to persist in landfill for centuries. When a £20 tent is abandoned at a festival, it doesn't decompose. It fragments. It becomes microplastics. It enters soil and water systems. It stays.
For festivals increasingly under scrutiny from local authorities, ticket buyers and sponsors over their environmental impact, the tent problem is both a practical headache and a reputational risk.
A different kind of material
At Greenstart, we started with an umbrella.
The logic was simple: umbrellas are discarded in enormous quantities, made from non-recyclable composites, and almost impossible to recover from waste streams. Could we build one from materials that simply disappear when they're no longer needed? The answer was kraft paper — a strong, flexible material derived from wood pulp — coated with a thin layer of PHA bioplastic. PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) is produced by bacteria and breaks down completely in natural environments, leaving no toxic residue. Combined with kraft paper, it creates a material that is genuinely waterproof, structurally sound, and fully biodegradable. It worked. And then we asked the obvious next question: how large can we build it?
The logic was simple: umbrellas are discarded in enormous quantities, made from non-recyclable composites, and almost impossible to recover from waste streams. Could we build one from materials that simply disappear when they're no longer needed? The answer was kraft paper — a strong, flexible material derived from wood pulp — coated with a thin layer of PHA bioplastic. PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) is produced by bacteria and breaks down completely in natural environments, leaving no toxic residue. Combined with kraft paper, it creates a material that is genuinely waterproof, structurally sound, and fully biodegradable. It worked. And then we asked the obvious next question: how large can we build it?
From umbrella to tent
Scaling from a personal umbrella to a shelter large enough to sleep in required solving real engineering challenges — load distribution, wind resistance, moisture management over multiple days rather than hours.
But the core material remained the same. Thicker paper. More coating. Better folding geometry. The result is a tent that performs across a 2–14 day festival window, with an ongoing development target of 12 months — and that biodegrades naturally once the festival is over.
No collection required. No landfill. No trace.
The business case for festivals
Beyond the environmental argument, there is an increasingly clear commercial case for biodegradable festival infrastructure.
Festivals face growing regulatory pressure on waste management. Local authority licensing increasingly includes waste reduction targets. Sponsors and brand partners are selecting festivals based on ESG alignment. And ticket buyers — particularly in the under-35 demographic that drives festival attendance — are making choices based on environmental values.
A festival that can offer truly biodegradable camping infrastructure isn't just reducing its waste bill. It's differentiating itself in a competitive market and future-proofing against tightening regulation.
We’re currently in pilot partnerships with two festivals for the 2027 season — including one of Scandinavia’s largest. If you’re involved in festival operations and want to understand what biodegradable infrastructure could mean for your event, we’d like to talk.
Contact us at lets@greenstartnow.com