Event Cleanup Workers Are Revealing The Most Bizarre Things They’ve Found Left Behind

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“Over 15 years of global festival production here. We find everything, especially because most of the events I’ve worked at are ‘leave no trace’ events, which means that during cleanup, we remove everything from the site. In no case have participants left no trace. At one point, I was in charge of the sanitation contract. We had a vendor who vastly underestimated and couldn’t keep up with the demand one year (the event was oversold), and there were literal pyramids of poop above the toilet seats all over the site during the event. People on acid would open up the door to a port-a-potty after standing in line for 20 minutes and just burst into tears, then add their bit to the pyramid. I have no idea what they used to wipe. Also, one year we had a bout of food poisoning hit our production commissary. One of my crewmates ended up shitting in his own cooler since he was stuck and super sick in his tent for a couple of days. I have PTSD from the poop stories.”

“Here are other memorable things found/dealt with after some festivals:

-An entire shipping container full of confiscated nitrous oxide. Fun times.

-An entire shipping container full of booze and strange weapons like a Samurai sword. It was a no-glass festival, so many folks just didn’t come back to pick up their liquor at the end. Also fun times!

-Another entire shipping container full of perfectly good floaties: rafts, flamingos, inner tubes, and all sorts of blow-up stuff. Even some blow-up dolls! That festival was on a lake.

-$1,000 was found in an abandoned backpack one year.

-COUNTLESS DRUGS.

-Thousands of bikes (Burning Man, but also others).

-Many shipping containers worth of tents, sleeping bags, and camping gear, etc. I’ve literally used a front-end loader to deal with that kind of stuff.

-Endless cellphones, headlamps, and water bottles.

One of the first big festivals I worked at was Lollapalooza in Chicago, where I brought a large sculpture. The production crew dropped off a forklift and a golf cart for us for teardown. At one point, I drove to the main production HQ to get paid, and they had put out about 100 cases of really nice booze to pick up. I took about 50 cases and didn’t buy vodka, whiskey, or açai liquor (?) for like three years.

Things I have personally salvaged from festival cleanup: a motorcycle, a side-by-side, about half the lumber in the house I’m building, a wellhead pump and about 350 feet of copper wire to run it, two Honda suitcase generators, a jacuzzi, all the sod for my front lawn, a 25-foot tipi, at least a quarter mile of livestock fencing, a commercial refrigerator, high-end rigging and safety gear, and a large percentage of my hand and power tools.”

—lazytranch