"I'm Keeping My Tent"

Here at My Festival Friend we’re doing our best to encourage festivalgoers to limit their environmental impact. At the heart of this is the I’m Keeping My Tent Campaign, encouraging every festivalgoer to buy better quality tents: MFF Recommended For Quality tents, which they are happy to keep and reuse time and again rather than leaving them at festivals.

A massive 23,500 tonnes of rubbish is generated each year by UK festivals and in 2018 32% of all festival waste ended up in landfill. This landfill waste mainly came from the campsites and consisted of tents and camping equipment. The materials used in cheap camping equipment are impossible to recycle and sadly even the stuff that makes it into recycling is often not recycled properly. The Guardian reports large amounts of UK recycling is sent out to far-out poorer destinations such as Malaysia (incurring huge carbon emissions) and large amounts of this recycling may be getting dumped in new landfill sites where some of the most endangered wildlife on this planet live, rather than being recycled.

Regrettably, lots of the camping equipment cleared up after UK festivals could easily have been reused and only a very small percentage of equipment left behind makes its way to charity, meaning that each abandoned tent has a colossal impact on the environment. My Festival Friend is focusing on getting every festivalgoer to do one small easily-done thing that will make a monumental difference. We are challenging you to unite and take your tents from festivals this year. We totally agree that it takes a top effort if you’re waking from some of the wasted slumbers I see many wake from. But we think this is easy to overcome if you and your camp make a pre-planned effort to look after your tents during the festival, pack them up and leave with them.

We have our part to play to help you. My Festival Friend is going to make it easy for you to pick tents with longevity that you will want to hang on to and take to festival after festival after festival. We have done this by creating the MFF Recommended For Quality Badge – an accreditation given to all the tents that meet a set of quality standards (click the hyperlink above). All the tents we give this accreditation to we will have tested ourselves to ensure they don’t just meet these standards on the specs sheet but the actual product we tested did too. This will ensure we have a range of high-quality, durable tents to offer My Festival Friend customers, allowing them to make at least one virtuous, responsible decision before a weekend where there will likely be a good few irresponsible ones made. Wouldn’t it be great to make sure you’ve got one in the bag? …A tent bag ;)

Look out for the MFF Recommended For Quality badge and take a look at the reasons we give for why they make the grade.

 Just because we have not given a tent the MFF Recommended For Quality badge does not mean it is a bad quality tent — we are confident all our offerings are good. Our priority is to provide you with a range of tents that meet the MFF Recommended For Quality standards and have been tested, we will likely prioritise testing tents from better-known brands with more positive reviews first as they have a higher chance of passing. So please always look closely at the MFF Tents Specs Table as every tent is a good standard —we only select tents with good waterproof ratings, for example.

We hope you enjoyed!

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