ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Excitement levels are no doubt building among Europe’s festival-goers for this year’s iconic Glastonbury Festival which takes place in June.

But these same revellers will next year be forced to hang up their hippy hats since Glastonbury 2012 has been cancelled. An expected national shortage of portaloo toilets due to the London 2012 Olympics has forced the organisers to rethink.

‘We have our own stock of portable toilets but we always need more,” said festival organiser Michael Eavis. “We shop around with four companies to get the best price, but there will be a huge demand for portaloo toilets in London in 2012 so every­one will push up their prices.

‘We realised early on that it was going to be a big problem and I can see it getting very expensive.”

A typical Glastonbury Festival requires upwards of 3,000 portaloos situated on around 70 sites. These are serviced by crews who travel the site for 14 hours a day sucking up the contents of the toilets using tractor-drawn vacuum tankers. The contents are then transported to a huge lagoon at the edge of the site.

The first Glastonbury Festival, which has become a regular UK summer event, was staged in 1970. Besides the toilet issue, Eavis is also concerned that the 2012 Olympics will swallow up much of the police presence that is usually earmarked for the festival.

“We were told that there will not be enough police to cover the festival in 2012 as they will all be in London,” he said. “We take a year off anyway every fifth or sixth year so we looked at the timing and thought it seemed sensible.”

• More than 100,000 free recycled rolls will be handed out at this year's Glastonbury Festival, due to be held from June 23-26. The aim is to increase recycling rates at the festival to 60 per cent from last year's 49 per cent.