The Sunrise Celebration seems like the sort of music festival at which a shift to greener practices is to be expected. As one bystander comments, “it does attract a crowd of people who want to know more” about green practices and sustainability. All energy used on-site must come from renewable sources, all food waste is composted and brought back to the site as fertilizer, and no one is allowed to use any disposable containers but the biodegradable ones provided by Sunrise. The Moon Beam café is cooking using solar panels, and buying fresh, organic or locally-sourced food each day.
One gentleman gives us a demonstration of his pedal-powered washing machine, which looks easy and relaxing— pedal gently for ten to thirty minutes, depending on the size and state of the load, and you have clean laundry! Other tents are set up to sell fair trade clothing or locally sourced food, and of course all the washrooms provided are composting toilets— which, our host points out, smell a lot better (or, at least, less bad) than your usual outhouse.
Trying to evaluate who will have the U.K.’s greenest festival is hard, but the people at Sunrise have such stringent rules that they definitely look like the winners. It’s good to see that such an event is, in fact, feasible, and not even that difficult to organize.
