Q What happens to all the camping gear left behind after a festival?

A Every festival has its own approach to the clear-up that takes place when the last stragglers have left. Events run by Mean Fiddler this summer – which include the Reading and Leeds festivals as well as Glastonbury – have teamed up with a project called Give Me Shelter (globalhand.org/givemeshelter), which collects abandoned equipment to redistribute through humanitarian organisations.

Allegedly there were collection points this year at Glastonbury, where you could take everything from tents and camping mats to chairs and rucksacks. All I saw were thousands of tents abandoned in muddy fields. From here I am assured that they were collected by a team of Give Me Shelter volunteers and taken to a designated airing and cleaning area.

Unless you are sure that such a scheme is operating, it is much better to get in the habit of taking home what you pack. Tents may be easy to donate to charities, but stinking wellies and batteries are not.

Nor are muddy dresses. I overheard girls saying that they had bought cheap clothes from Primark to wear to Glastonbury so that they could shed them. Convenient maybe, but disposable festival fashion is not green.

When I spoke to the Glasto organiser Michael Eavis earlier this year, he admitted that he still had a pile of wellies from 2003.

Whether such a huge event as Glastonbury can be green at all is examined by next week’s Countryfile on BBC One (Sunday, 11am), a programme that is bound to be entertaining, if only for the opportunity to witness the state of your bedraggled columnist after three days of rainy camping.

Q How can I support the Prince of Wales’s rejected vegetables?

A I take it that you are talking about the carrots rejected by Sainsbury’s earlier this year, rather than anything pushed to the side of the royal platter. To fill you in: the royal root veg saga began in January when organic carrots from Highgrove’s Home Farm failed to meet the supermarket’s quality controls.

Those from the West Wales farm of Patrick Holden, the head of the Soil Association, also failed to make the grade. For 20 years, Holden has been supplying carrots to Sainsbury’s, which goes to show that no one is immune from a supermarket snub – neither blue blood nor impeccable organic credentials will spare you.

According to Holden, it is the centralised distribution system that is at fault. His vegetables suffered while they travelled from the farm to a superpacker in East Anglia, before being sent on to the supermarket distribution centre, clocking up a heavy carbon footprint as well as some unsightly wrinkly bits.

The good news is that the River Nene Vegbox Scheme rescued Holden’s carrots and incorporated 95 per cent of them into its deliveries (rivernene.co.uk). As for the royal veg, a spokesman tells me that the majority of the Prince’s carrots are sold locally. A large number go to local schools, others go to local box schemes, with the remaining lot being sent to farmers’ markets in Gloucestershire.

It is also a happy coincidence that plans for a Duchy Originals shop stocking its organic produce have recently been unveiled.

Due to open next spring, it is an illustration of how swiftly and gracefully royals can rise above a supermarket snub.

For Anna’s e-mail address and Eco-Blog, timesonline.co.uk/ecoworrier

BLOGWATCH

My latest garden discovery is borage (below). With its vivid blue flowers, this herb brings colour to my garden and attracts bees that pollinate my plants. But what else is it good for? “Use the flowers in Pimm’s for a wonderful drink for eco-chic weddings,” Rosie writes. “You can also scatter the chopped leaves over your home-grown salad, along with nasturtium flowers.”

Cath mixes it with thyme leaves to marinade her lamb chops prebarbecue, while Nicki say that it is thanks to borage that plans to grow GM blight-resistant potatoes in Yorkshire were stopped earlier this year. Borage farmers raised concerns that beekeepers would no longer bring bees to help pollinate their crop owing to its proximity to fields of GM crops, and the trial was cancelled.

GREENIE POINTS

DO IT

When your printer packs up, it’s not down to you to dispose of it. Along with other so-called “e-waste” – computing equipment, mobile phones and kitchen appliances – either take it back to the shop or find out if there is a collection site set up by your council and funded by manufacturers. The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive is now law, making manufacturers and retailers responsible for disposing of such products.

CLICK IT

With about 26 million cars jostling for space on the roads in the UK, it is little wonder that many people find their morning commute to work sluggish.

Should you not be inclined to cycle, you can join the 150,000 people who regularly use liftshare.org. After logging on – which is free – you will be matched with others making a similar journey and, who knows, a blossoming friendship might be sparked.

SKIP IT

While it’s good news that McDonald’s plans to run some of its delivery fleet on recycled cooking oil, it’s not yet time to swap your lunchtime salad for a Big Mac. The fast-food giant has a long way to go on the packaging front. Discarded McFlurry plastic pots are a national pest, along with polyethylene-coated cups. Since the nature of fast food is that you eat it quickly, why can’t McD’s cut the amount of wrapping it doles out?

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