DS Smith, a packaging company, is taking cardboard solutions from supermarket shelves to festivals in a bid to create a sustainable tent for attendees.
The firm's partnership with Envirotent aims to use recycled cardboard to build an insulated tent that is completely recyclable, protective against inclement weather, and even soundproof, as edie reported.
The problem the two companies hope to solve is the prevalence of single-use tents at festivals that commonly end up in the trash, despite the best efforts of campsites and organizers. Conventional tents have a mixture of hard-to-recycle materials like metal, plastic, and synthetic textiles.
Even if users have the best of intentions, edie notes a OnePoll survey revealed that 52% of users admit that they'll be one-and-done. That contributes to an estimated 250,000 that go into methane-producing British landfills each year that contributes to the warming of the planet.
Some of the materials in those tents will take centuries to break down, and their components can leak into groundwater and soil with dangerous results.
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DS Smith's managing director for the United Kingdom and Ireland packaging division, Paul Clarke, told edie that while "festivals are at the heart of British summertime," they currently come with "shocking images" of countless rows of abandoned tents destined for landfills.
A couple of disturbing examples of this came at the Creamfields North 2023 music festival in Cheshire and this year's Reading festival. The problem is certainly not confined to Great Britain, as the Michigan-based 2023 Electric Forest Festival left a stunning amount of trash to be cleaned up.
Enter the solution of a cardboard tent that abandons the difficult-to-recycled coatings. DS Smith divulged to edie that "if we added one to the board, we'd defeat our entire objective." Despite no coating, the company asserts their tent can survive nearly a month of wintry weather, including rain.
The company took lessons from its existing business of replacing plastic in supermarkets and adapted it for the task.
"We shifted the way we thought about design in order to protect a person, not a product," Clarke said.
The launch of the product coincided with the Glastonbury Festival in June. The two companies planned to collect the tents after the event, with DS Smith recycling them.
DS Smith and Envirotent's solution joins other efforts to solve the festival waste problem. Retribe, a company founded by two Sheffield natives, upcycles discarded items into products like lunch bags.
Decathlon, an outdoor tent retailer, unveiled a trade-in program called "No Tent Left Behind" to reward customers who save their tents instead of trashing them.
Meanwhile, festivals can do their own part by adopting sustainability measures like Coachella has in recent years.
All of these efforts can help make consumers feel better about going to festivals and not harming the planet while they do. Clarke is confident that the cardboard tents can make a big difference.
"We are really excited for the difference we can make together so people can create less waste and have a guilt-free festival," he said.
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