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The
colossal metal arachnid, made from recycled military hardware,
has been a fixture at England's world-famous music festival for
years, but this time Arcadia and all the other stages at
Glastonbury are being powered entirely by renewable energy
sources, organisers say.
The sprawling festival, which features hundreds of acts and a
colourful, unending melange of art, has long advocated
sustainability and was once home to one of the UK's largest
private solar power plants.
This year, all its generators, including those that power its
main Pyramid stage will run on hydrotreated vegetable oil, a
renewable substitute for diesel made from waste cooking oil,
organisers said.
"With the current infrastructure that festivals run on, it was
clear one of the more efficient ways it could be done is by
using a waste fuel to power all those bits of machinery," the
Arcadia stage co-founder Bertie Cole told British monthly DJ
Mag.
"It's been an ongoing experiment, and this year it just felt
like we had got there."
For a festival that prides itself on its social consciousness,
Glastonbury has faced criticism for its impact on the
environment, including the piles of rubbish left behind by many
of its 200,000 attendees, despite organisers imploring them to
"leave no trace".
Public urination by drug-taking revellers has previously
contaminated the local freshwater ecosystem around Worthy Farm,
and people travelling to Glastonbury, often flying in from
overseas, have been a major contributor to its carbon footprint.
But for their part, organisers are trying to mitigate the
overall impact as much as possible.
This year, a temporary, 20-metre wind turbine - another source
of renewable power - towers over a section of Worthy Farm,
powering food stalls with enough energy to run 300 fridges a
day.
(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar; editing by Giles Elgood)
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