EVENT CLEAN-UPS
A ROUGH GIG
One of the major talking points during festival season, as well as the bands and the weather, is the dreaded festival toilet. Some are so put off by them that they won’t even go to any festivals. However, we managed to catch up with Jane Healy, Sanitation Manager at Glastonbury Festival, to learn more about the logistics of managing festival toilets, and to hear how they are getting better.
You may remember around this time last year, I spoke to two volunteer litter pickers about their experiences of working at festival sites up and down the country, cleaning up the rubbish that campers leave behind once the frivolities have come to an end.
This year, we here at TCHQ decided to go one better, and tracked down Jane Healy, the Sanitation Manager for Glastonbury Festival. In her role as Sanitation Manager, Jane is responsible for overseeing the cleaning and maintenance of all 5,000 toilets across the site – ranging from the new compost toilets, portaloos and the dreaded ‘long drops’. The toilets at music festivals are always a talking point, to put it mildly, with many would-be festival goers put off attending because of the ‘toilet situation’, so we were keen to talk with Jane to hear from the other side of the coin, and to find out what goes into such a monumental task.
Although the festival was back in the last week of June, Jane is still onsite now, as thanks to the awful weather
54 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning August 2016
conditions this year (I went as a visitor, and let me tell you, it was very muddy!) it has taken a considerably longer time to clean up after the event. Even so, we were able to get a spare ten minutes with her to hear more about this fascinating job.
Tomorrow’s Cleaning (TC): So Jane, Sanitation Manager for Glastonbury Festival sounds like a really interesting role, how did you get into it?
Jane Healy (JH): I’ve worked in various different roles in different parts of Glastonbury over the years, and then I ended up in infrastructure doing purchasing. However, having spent the last ten years working in festivals, I had a lot of knowledge of working with compost toilets, and this was an area that the organisers wanted to move into, instead of having the portaloos. So because I had so much experience of working with them, I was brought across to help with the transition from portaloos to compost.
TC: I have noticed in recent years a move towards compost toilets, with most of the portaloos now off-site in
the campervan fields and so on. What were the reasons behind this switch?
JH: There were a couple of reasons for this. One was to dramatically reduce vehicle movement onsite, as you wouldn’t have the big tractors and gully suckers going around five or six times a day emptying toilets, which isn’t very nice for the visitors, and it can also be quite dangerous trying to get these big vehicles around the crowds. And also, the environmental benefit is greater with compost toilets. If we use compost toilets, then a couple of years down the line, once it’s all been composted down we can use it onsite instead of having to take it away to a waste plant. It’s much more environmentally friendly.
It was a big step to move away from portaloos to compost toilets, but the organisers were really behind us. They do want to try different things.
TC: The environmental benefits are obviously of great importance, especially to Glastonbury Festival, but what other positives can come from switching to compost toilets?
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