Festivals can make it easy to be sustainable — here's how

Michelle McKeown: "All Together Now's recycling scheme was excellent to see, but it was incomplete." Picture: All Together Now.

At All Together Now — Irish music was not squeezed into an early-afternoon slot as a polite concession to the home crowd. It was everywhere. Nearly half of the 2026 line-up was Irish, with Kneecap, Christy Moore, The Mary Wallopers, The Gurriers, KhakiKid and many others spread across Curraghmore’s stages. 

And the music was excellent. Irish artists commanded huge crowds rather than being treated as the warm-up for imported headliners. All Together Now felt culturally self-assured, imaginative and proudly local. A festival ambitious enough to put Irish talent at its centre should be equally ambitious about protecting the landscape hosting it.

In the main arena, the Re-turn Re-treat offered an ingenious incentive. At the point I visited, 20 eligible cans or bottles could be exchanged for rewards, including a massage. Containers could also be placed in orange bins, with their deposit value going to Return for Children, which supports six national children’s charities. As festival gimmicks go, it was a good one. After days of walking, dancing and sleeping on ground that became harder by the hour, a massage was a compelling reason to collect rubbish, but the queues for said massage were long. However, it gave discarded cans an immediate value and made recycling visible, social and even slightly competitive. But a reward is not the same as a refund.

Under Ireland’s Deposit Return Scheme, consumers pay 15 cent on eligible containers up to 500ml and 25 cent on larger containers up to three litres. At a normal participating retailer, that money can be reclaimed in cash or through a voucher. At the Re-treat I used, the options were a reward or charity. There was no straightforward way to get the deposit back. If 20 containers each carried a 15-cent deposit, they represented €3. Donating that money should be an available and encouraged choice, but it should still be a choice. Festival weekends are expensive enough without environmental virtue becoming another compulsory surcharge. 

An aerial view of part of the All Together Now festival site. Picture: Aaron Cahill

The more serious gap was the campsite. I saw the dedicated orange bins and reward scheme in the arena, but not where we were camping. Unless I missed them and in that case they were not enough of them. This does not mean there was no waste infrastructure. The festival’s licence application planned separate waste streams for cans and plastic bottles and listed 125 large bins for the main campsite, with further bins for boutique, family and campervan areas.

Yet the branded Re-turn system did not appear to extend meaningfully into the campground I used. That is where people store slabs of drinks, spend long periods and generate a substantial share of festival waste. A scheme requiring tired campers to retain their empties and carry them into the arena is asking for motivation to compensate for weak design. Re-turn’s own guidance says festival collection systems should be visible, easy to use and planned around site layout and waste flows. If orange bins and return points are absent from, or difficult to find in, a campsite, the system is failing that basic test.

Other festivals show that stronger systems are possible. At Electric Picnic in 2025, Re-turn reported that 545,000 cans and plastic bottles were collected during the event and post-festival clean-up. That includes containers recovered afterwards, so it is not a perfect measure of attendee participation. But it is at least a published result against which future performance can be judged. Roskilde Festival in Denmark goes further. 

It operates three refund stands across its camping areas, adds refund value to festival wristbands and allows the money to be transferred to a debit or credit card. Its system is not identical to Ireland’s, but it disproves the idea that camping, wristbands, cashless payments and genuine refunds cannot be combined. 

The wider Irish scheme clearly can work. Re-turn says recycling of covered containers has risen from 49 per cent before its introduction to more than 90 per cent, while bottle-and-can litter has fallen substantially. Financial incentives change behaviour but only when people can access them.

At the time of writing, I could find no published total on the official festival or Re-turn news pages. No number of containers collected, percentage recovered or amount donated, but I’m sure these will be published. At the moment, I cannot say the scheme succeeded simply because it was colourful, busy or good for photographs. 

All Together Now got the difficult part right on stage. It trusted Irish artists and audiences, and it was brilliant. Its recycling scheme was excellent to see, but it was incomplete. Next year, dedicated return points in every campsite, refunds to wristbands or bank cards, charity as an opt-in choice and a public post-festival audit would turn a clever promotional activation into a credible environmental system.