More than 99% of tents at the Glastonbury Festival were taken home, co-organiser Emily Eavis has said.
The event, which has the ethos Love The Farm, Leave No Trace, concluded on Monday following headline performances from Stormzy, The Killers and The Cure.
Climate change and the environment was the central theme of this year’s festival, which banned the sale of single-use plastic bottles.
Before it began, Eavis urged festival-goers to bring a sturdy tent that they would bring home with them for a “lifetime of camping experiences”.
Just heard that 99.3% of all tents were taken home. That is absolutely incredible… HUGE thanks to the record numbers who loved the farm and left no trace! #Glastonbury2019 pic.twitter.com/5wzN9GPX0c
— Emily Eavis (@emilyeavis) July 2, 2019
She tweeted: “Just heard that 99.3% of all tents were taken home. That is absolutely incredible…
“Huge thanks to the record numbers who loved the farm and left no trace!”
Hundreds of volunteers began clearing the site from the early hours of Monday, hand-separating each piece of litter and rubbish placed in 15,000 bins.
The mammoth task of returning Worthy Farm to its herd of 1,000 cows takes up to six weeks and cost £785,000 in 2017.
Tonnes of litter will be processed by an on-site recycling centre, while cooking oil will be turned into biofuel and food waste into compost.
On Sunday, Sir David Attenborough made a surprise appearance on the festival’s Pyramid stage.
He described one sequence in Blue Planet II showing the effect of plastic on ocean creatures.
“It had an extraordinary effect and now this great festival has gone plastic-free,” Sir David said.
The move is estimated to have saved one million plastic bottles from being drunk during the event.
Avon and Somerset Police has also revealed that the number of crimes at this year’s Glastonbury fell by 40%.
There were 128 crimes recorded over the five-day festival, compared to 213 two years ago.
These included 79 thefts in contrast with 123 in 2017, and 17 drug offences compared to 37.
There were 15 offences classified as violence against the person, almost 30% lower than the previous festival.
Drugs offences made up 16 of this year’s 25 arrests.
On Sunday, a security guard was found dead in his tent on one of the campsites at the festival.
The force spokesman said: “Officers attended and are satisfied the man’s death is not suspicious.
“The coroner has been informed.”
South Western Ambulance Service attended a total of 178 incidents over the festival, a figure a spokesman described as “similar to previous years”.
He said these involved heat-related, medical and trauma incidents.