Concert-goers to this weekend's Oxegen Festival will be encouraged to leave their tents behind them when they leave so they can be recycled for charity.
MCD, the organisers of Oxegen, are hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's event when 23 tents were burned by concert-goers as they left the site. An initiative at the Glastonbury festival in Britain last month resulted in 10,000 tents being left to the Save Darfur Campaign and it is hoped to surpass that at Oxegen.
Scouting Ireland are planning to recycle the tents for distribution to villages where there is a homeless problem in Africa. Scouting Ireland will also erect tents for concert-goers for a small donation.
Eighty thousand music fans are expected for this year's events at the Punchestown racecourse in Co Kildare this weekend.
Complaints about the burning, along with allegations of theft from tents, surfaced on websites after last year's festival, but MCD spokesman Justin Green said reports had been "exaggerated".
A total of 910 security personnel will be on place on the campsites working on a 24 hour basis. There will be sites allocated for barbeques. Anybody caught lighting a fire in the campsites will be ejected and those who burn tents as they are leaving will be traced through their credit card booking numbers.
Each campsite will have a watchtower, professional fire fighters and civil defence fire fighting units and a 24-hour field hospital.
Tickets for Oxegen sold out within an hour and a half of going on sale in March. The line-up, which includes The Killers, Muse, Arcade Fire, Razorlight, Scissor Sisters and Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, has confirmed its status as the equal of any summer music festival in Europe.
It is hoped that this year's will be the most socially aware to date coinciding as it does with the Live Earth series of concerts on Saturday to highlight the issue of global warming. The Stop Climate Chaos coalition will be on site.
In The Ticket tomorrow: Beth Ditto of The Gossip comes up for Oxegen
