I read with great interest your article ‘Greens praise Pride as “best yet” for recycling', in which Councillor Amy Kennedy concluded “hats off to all involved for setting a new standard for waste management at the city’s events”.

I believe Councillor Kennedy must be confused as to where the actual festival took place. For anyone who witnessed the state of Preston Park on Monday morning, with large piles of rubbish - not recycled by Pride’s new contractors, which subsequently had to be cleared by the council’s team, you'd find it hard to describe the clean up efforts in such glowing terms.

See the last two photos at the following link for evidence: news.bbc.co.uk/local/sussex/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8897000/8897704.stm


If you compare those photos with images taken a few years ago (on the same Monday directly after Pride) when the clean up was carried out by the funfair contractors and you can clearly see the difference.

It is also interesting to read how the council is ‘now’ working on a sustainable event management system for outdoor events, with the aim of achieving British Standard BS8901: Sustainable Event Management in 2011.

After extensive research projects on the environmental impact of outdoor music events I worked as a consultant with Arup on the consultation period for BS8901.

My consultancy also included work with the music event producer Live Nation on their exploration of BS8901, and extensive audits of their outdoor events including Download Festival, Wireless Festivals and most significantly the Al Gore motivated 'Live Earth' Concert at Wembley Stadium.

In 2008 I was commissioned to perform an environmental audit of Brighton Pride. It covered everything from waste management, energy and resource use and recycling, through to the impact that the closing of Preston Park station had on the businesses in that area and the subsequent increased human traffic in the city centre.

Unfortunately, despite noises that the council were looking to achieve the BS8901 standard back around 2008, when it came to actually funding the report, there was no money available. Subsequently the audit had to be paid for by the production company at the time, Wilde Ones.

I spent a great deal of time consulting with Wilde Ones about the use of biodiesel, and an enormous amount of research (both time and money), went into investigating the composting of bio-degradeable materials on site. It subsequently transpired that a shredding machine would be required to effect this on-site composting. However, when it came to funding this activity the following year (2009) on my advice from 2008, once again there was no money available.

A great deal of work and many changes - by myself, Wilde Ones and many of the contractors and traders on the park - were put into place between 2008 and 2009 in order to improve sustainability for the event. When it came to supporting this work, Brighton council was disappointingly unhelpful. These facts somehow seem to have been forgotten.

For a current Councillor to now praise what was the diabolical 'clean up' operation that occurred last weekend, and make the inaccurate and erroneous statements that she did, is insulting in the extreme to the genuine hard work put in by myself and others in previous years to make a marked reduction in Pride's environmental impact so future generations can fully enjoy all that Pride has to offer.