Sustainability

🌎 We’re delighted to share our 2024 Green Pledge and just some of the ways we’re minimising our impact on the environment and striving to #LeaveOnlyFootprints…

♻️Increasing our recycling rate by up to 10%

🏖️Daily Beach Cleans

💧Free water refill points (288 of them!)

🥤No single-use plastics + reusable cup schemes

🚌Green Travel operations with Big Green Coach + shuttle buses

🥗Veggie + vegan options at all traders 

🗑️24-hour litter picking teams

💚Dedicated Green Team

Last year, we doubled the amount of beach cleans completed during the festival, adding in cleans at Great Western and Porth Beaches as well as Watergate Bay & Fistral! 164 brilliant volunteers spent 48 hours helping us to recover litter during our 24  beach cleans. These amazing community groups, festival goers and supporters continue to help us do our best for the amazing place we call home.

5,700 of you also helped us collect bags of rubbish to get your litter bond back – do you reckon we can double it this year?

In 2022 the Industry ‘More Than Music’ Report found that Boardmasters was one of the leading festivals in the UK when it came to their ambitions and social and environmental commitments. Its findings were highly praised by the Association of Independent Festivals, Association of Festival Organisers and Industry Press. How cool is that!

We wanted to share with you some of the things we have planned this year, alongside sharing with you the awesome work that has been happening behind the scenes since last year. But to get involved in 2024 you can:

• Leave nothing but footprints: Keep your camp clean and take your tent home

• Protect Nature: Help us with beach cleans and campsite cleans and make sure you get your litter bond back

• Think about your travel: Use public transport and the shuttle bus to make new friends and save on queuing!

Porth Beach 

• 3724 litter items collected recorded with 41 kg of litter removed
• 167 volunteers

Watergate Bay 

• 2421 litter items collected and recorded with 43 kg of litter removed
• 42 volunteers 

Fistral 

• 3589 litter items collected and recorded with 112 kg of litter removed 
• 120 volunteers

Great Western

• 3079 litter items collected and recorded with 194 kg of litter removed
• 125 volunteers

TOTALS across all four beaches over five days:

• 12,813 litter items collected and recorded All logged in Marine Conservation Society’s 30 year dataset 
• 390 kg of litter removed from beaches
• 454 volunteers nb many of these were repeat volunteers each morning

It’s integral we all do our bit to create an environment where everyone is inspired to take immediate positive action 💙

Here are just some of the ways you can help to #LeaveOnlyFootprints and make this year’s Boardmasters the greenest yet. 

⛺ Take your tent home and keep your campsite clean to get your litterbond back

🚌 Travel to Boardmasters with Big Green Coach, by train with Great Western Railway or liftshare with friends​ 

💧 Bring your reusable water bottle + fill up at the free refill points​ (look out for spot prizes up for grabs over the festival) 

💚 Join our Leave Only Footprints Crew

🏖️ Join a daily beach clean​ with the Marine Conservation Society 

🎟 Return a full bag of litter & redeem your £10 litter bond

🚐Take the shuttle bus between festival sites 

🎉Join morning campsite clean up parties -look out for the clean up conga to be in with the chance of getting a Boardies treat! 

🚽Don’t wee on the land!​ ​

Our amazing Green team is a group of friendly sustainability enthusiasts who embody the ethos of Boardmasters ensuring people are tidying up after themselves, whilst still having a good time.

They help us to protect the Cornish Coastline and create a greener, cleaner festival!

 Trebelsue Farm, Watergate Bay and Fistral Beach combine to make an awesome festival site – and we want to look after it, so the Green Team, plus support from our friends at the Marine Conservation Society, help us make a positive impact throughout the festival, helping our festival goers leave nothing but footprints. 

Keep an eye out for them to help you get your litter bond back and share other ways you can have a more positive impact at Boardmasters. You can find them at the Cribbar Village litter bond and around the campsites, arena, info points – come say hi.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to leave no trace at Boardmasters – our Green Team will be in the campsites managing our litter bond in Cribbar Village, handing out bin bags, and at waste points make it easy for you to tidy up as you go before you head in to party.

• Exchange a bag of rubbish at the Litter Bond to redeem your £10
• Look out for our clearly marked recycle & waste bins
• Take your tents home and keep your camp clean
• Don’t wee (or worse) on the farm, we have enough toilets!
• Use our water stations for free refills
• Dispose of vapes carefully using the specialist bins in the Campsite & Arena or take them home with you. 
  • Vapes cause hazardous waste which can’t be included in our recycling process. 

We started the Litter Bond scheme in 2018, and it’s been a roaring success, but we know we can do better. Did you know that if you give us a filled bag of waste you get your £10 back? Simply drop the back at our Litter Bond in Cribbar village (you can find it on maps plus the app). 

Using the right recycling bins and not dropping litter on the ground helps us immensely in managing our waste as a festival. We are helping you by providing larger waste bins and in more areas around the site – as well as having our Green Team volunteers on hand to help you.

If you smoke or use vapes, please be aware how dangerous this can be to the local environment and wildlife.  Throw your cigarette butts in the bin, and make sure to either take your empty vapes home or dispose of them in a vape bin.

Vapes = hazardous waste. There are safety issues with the lithium batteries inside them prone to causing fires if damaged when binned in general waste or recycling. Batteries hidden inside vapes can cause fires if crushed or damaged in general recycling or waste streams. Vapes must be recycled separately at the specific bins located in the campsites and arenas, or please take them home with you.

Don’t forget to bring a reusable bottle so you can get access to the free water points throughout the weekend and keep hydrated (and even win spot prizes from the Green Team). 

As an added bonus, it also helps us towards reducing plastic waste onsite. And if you forget your bottle, don’t worry – you can buy your own exclusive one from our merch shop.

Did you know that 80% of festival emissions come from audience travel!

If everyone who we transported to Boardmasters 2023 travelled individually, the passenger miles our customers travelled would have totalled 1,891, 693 miles. Or…77 times around the earth!

By car sharing, or better still, using public transport or cycling to the festival we can significantly reduce the amount of pollution produced. Click through to our green partners – Big Green Coach, GWR, and make use of our shuttle bus service. It also reduces traffic and queues into the festival meaning we can all get in and party quicker!

In 2023, 200, 789 kilos of carbon were saved and offset through coach travel!

Our shuttle bus service also ensures we minimise the traffic impact on the local area and the amazing community that allows our festival to happen every year. Nearly 35 THOUSAND journeys were taken on the shuttle bus last year!

Shuttle buses are £3.50 for a one way journey.

Operating hours: 

07:30 – 04:30 (Wednesday to Monday – Please note there will be a reduced service on Monday morning).

Location: Shuttle Bus Station at Blue Gate.

Watergate Bay > Fistral Beach

1. Watergate Bay Festival Site (Shuttle Bus Station, arena entrance)
2. Cliff Road (near Aldi, Newquay Rail Station)
3. Manor Road Bus Station (10 min walk to Fistral Beach)

Fistral Beach > Watergate Bay

1. Manor Road Bus Station (10 min walk to Fistral Beach)
2. Cliff Road (near Aldi, Newquay Rail Station)
3. Watergate Bay Festival Site (Shuttle Bus Station, arena entrance)

We also charge a £50 car park re-entry so it’s cheaper and quicker to jump on our shuttle buses. 

The money we raise on for re-entry fees goes directly to the Boardmasters Foundation, helping us raise hundreds of thousands of pounds to invest in the local community projects. Find out more about the Foundation here.

Last year we enlisted the help of betternotstop, a B Corp Certified sustainable impact and audience behaviour change agency. They have created a bespoke reporting template we can use to report and measure key metrics in our business. We are continuing to work with them for 2024 and beyond!​

They work with us pre, during and post event to coordinate the Green Team, improve our waste management and measure and review the work we are doing, and help us put together a robust reporting and action plan for future years. ​

For Boardmasters to be sustainable, we all have a duty to make sure that the land on which we call home is looked after. It’s a significant task but one we are passionate about. We cannot do it without all 220,000 visitors and people working across our sites, and there are many ways in which we ask for their help to protect our environment and the future of Boardmasters. 

See you at the beach!