Our Festival, Our Planet

At Vantastival we care passionately about the sustainability of our activities, about climate change, and about the future.

For our 10th year and for the many more to come, we will be incorporating a number of new and improved strategies to help fight against the impact and waste that we as a festival, and you as our patrons, create during the weekend.

We need to change the way we interact with this incredible world of ours in order to preserve what we have.

Some things Vantastival is doing this year:

Vantastival’s food traders will be using ONLY compostable foodware
The introduction of our EcoCups last year was a great success, saving in excess of 5,000 single use plastic cups going to landfill. They’ll be back in O’Hara’s Tow Bar this year, while we’ll also have steel pint cups available.
We’re introducing compostable toilets! This will save water and create “humanure” for our on-site tree planting for carbon off-setting. Proper job.
Re-usable water bottles – to minimise the amount of plastic bottle waste, we are providing re-usable steel water bottles for all our crew and encouraging them to re-fill from the water points on site. We strongly encourage you to bring your own re-usable bottles instead of buying bottled water. We will also be asking all our performers to bring their own bottles and will provide water containers at the stages for re-filling, instead of the vast quantities of bottled water provided in previous years.
Environmental Education – in association with our Sustainability Partners Indaver and Repak ELT, we are presenting a host of environmental talks and workshops over the weekend. Do take the time to take in some of these, as they promise to be interesting and insightful. Organisations that will be represented at Vantastival this year include
- Every Can Counts
- Extinction Rebellion
- Climate Ambassador
- Bear in Mind
- Young Friends of the Earth
- Not Here, Not Anywhere
- Seal Rescue Ireland
- Zero Waste Festival
- Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland
- Irish Marine Institute… and more to be announced.
Biodiversity Survey – On March 30 2019, a Biodiversity Survey was conducted at Beaulieu House estate by the ecological company Saol Glas. The field survey will be repeated twice – once at the end of the growing season in 2019, and once more in March/April 2020, to monitor how the land recovers before Vantastival 2020 and to help us to understand any impacts that the event may have on the biodiversity around Beaulieu House and to manage the event in a way to preserve this biodiversity. Download the summary report of the biodiversity survey here.

Some things you can do to help!

Limit the amount of disposable/single use plastic you bring to site and where possible, don’t bring any at all.
Bring snacks, drinks and other items in reusable containers that you can bring home when empty and use again, we all have some old school tupperware knocking about the house, put it to good use!
Use a stainless steel water bottle, let’s do away with bottled water entirely. We suggest stainless steel as they’re far more solid than aluminium and don’t have any of the nasty HDPE chemicals plastic reusable bottles have. Refilling on site is easy and free!
If you are a smoker, bring a portable ashtray with a lid and please don’t throw cigarette butts on the ground.
if you see something out of place, whether a can, a plastic bottle or a pair of broken sunglasses pick it up and put them in the appropriate bins!
Avoid buying cheap camping gear, as cheap tents and chairs are often one use items too. They break and tear and end up in the tip after only a couple of uses. Think about investing a little more money in a better tent that will last you years or ask a friend to borrow theirs if possible!
We’re encouraging our patrons and crew to try and introduce more meat free meals into their festival and daily lives. We have plenty of vegetarian and vegan options this year, don’t worry!
Costumes are great but cheap costume items that are used once and thrown away just end up in landfill and are around for hundreds of years, all for one weekend. Get creative, make your own, they’ll be better quality and unlike anyone else’s!

We want everyone to have a good time and that includes our future generations!

View the Generation Hour timetable of talks here