Vapes Not Allowed At Glastonbury 2023

Glastonbury festival organisers have added vapes to their “do not bring” list, urging attendees to think about the product’s environmental impact.

Disposable vapes are officially unwelcome at Britain’s biggest music festival. As the Do Not Bring list notes, “They pollute the environment and can be hazardous at waste centres.”

Vapes are on the Do Not Bring list along with gazebos (“they take up valuable tent space in the campsites. We’d also rather you didn’t put tape around your tent enclosures, please. It makes it harder for other people to get to their tents”), glass, knives, excess packaging, laser equipment, pens, animals (guide dogs are the exception to the rule), laughing gas, and more.

Also mentioned on the Do Not Bring list due to environmental impact is non-biodegradable body glitter – punters can purchase the biodegradable kind at the festival – and disposable wipes, “which quickly breakdown into micro-plastics” and “are problematic environmental pollutants”.

This year’s Glastonbury festival has received backlash for its all-male, all-white headliners in Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John – it’s important to note, however, that Guns N’ Roses’ current drummer, Frank Ferrer, is African American, and the band added a female keyboard player "of Chinese, English, Spanish, Japanese, Filipino, Irish, Scottish and Danish descent," Melissa Reese (per her website), to their lineup in 2016. 

A commenter on social media said about the line-up earlier this year, “Of the 30 headliners since 2010, only FOUR have been women (Beyonce, Adele, Billie Eilish, Florence and the Machine). Even then, Florence was only a replacement because Foo Fighters had to pull out”.

Meanwhile, musician Grace Petrie took to Twitter to express her own experiences, referencing Glastonbury co-owner Emily Eavis's "pipeline" comments in The Guardian and concluded, “I’ve done all I can do, all that is in my power to do to be in ‘the pipeline’. I think the blockage is at the other end.”

Last month, it was announced that Australia would ban vapes in a “major health crackdown”. While introducing the plans to ban disposable vapes and the new regulations, Health Minister Mark Butler said, “The former government allowed this black market to flourish for too long and as a result, vaping has become a menace in our schools and society.”

There's something to say when it comes to the fact that the government is banning e-cigarette products, yet other harmful products like cigarettes and alcohol are still very accessible to the general public and damaging the environment.

It's also difficult to determine whether the recent ban is genuinely in the plight of public health, or whether it's yet another move to increase the hold on what we, as Australians, can or can't do.