IT'S four years since I last wrote about the gratuitous waste at the Leeds Music Festival, and it's time to check whether it's still a thoughtless and selfish abuse of the planet.

Volunteers from the Bradford Metropolitan Food Bank charity attend each year as it's closing when the mud spattered, exhausted and deafened younger generation is trudging home. This bank holiday we scavenged for the likes of noodles, beans and biscuits amongst the discarded clothes, sleeping bags and cooking equipment in the thousands of abandoned tents. The fifty crates of collected edibles made it worth while.

In 2012 I described it as a cross between a refugee camp, the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo and an Afghanistan military base, and it's disappointingly still the same, though I should perhaps add the term 'landfill site' this year. It ticks all the boxes for the best ways to produce CO2 and it's time that this was addressed.

It starts with almost 100,000 folk getting there, many dropped off and collected by parents suffering long traffic jams, though from the amount of mud the cleaners had to deal with at Leeds railway station some travelled by train.

This was only part of the transport induced CO2 as the festival structures, the miles of metal sheet fencing, the stages, the generators, the extra cabling and lighting, the marquees and the toilets were brought in by huge lorries along temporary roads. The night time activity gave ample opportunity for the diesel generators to pump out CO2.

And then there's the waste. Around 30,000 or more abandoned tents, made from synthetic fabric, plus their metal poles, with about half of them containing jettisoned clothing, sleeping bags and mats, as well as cooking equipment. Apart from a handful of tents that had been folded up and left at a collecting point the rest were waiting for the tractors to scrape them up for disposal, probably by incineration miles away.

It's all an excellent example of our selfish throw away society with little thought of the impact. It's disappointing that there's so little awareness of individual carbon budgets and personal responsibility in this younger generation though many of them will be alive near the end of the century when the climate will be out of control, and they and their children will suffer enormously.

There's a strong case for a serious review of education syllabuses, to include carbon studies in the core, but in the meantime I would suggest another £100 on the cost of festival entry – that is £200 up to £300 - with all the £10 million raised annually invested in tree planting and renewable energy schemes throughout Yorkshire.