While dancing in the sunshine at this year’s Field Day, you can imagine my surprise when a young reveller in customary summer-festival fluoro staggered up, offering to take empty beer cans off my hands. In fact, she was carrying a whole garbage bag full!

Was she simply an ultra-friendly type? Or had she dabbled in strange substances that increased her desire for the collection of aluminium goods?

I was perplexed, until I noticed the rebate rates advertised at the bar. Turns out, returning cans to the recycling stations refunded part of the money you’d just spent on drinks. Pure genius! Encouraging environmentally friendly festival-goers (not to mention cutting costs on the clean up).

But as the day wore on, I couldn’t help but notice that the more wasted people got, there was a lot less dancing and a hell-of-a-lot of people scouting out empty drink vessels. You could barely have a drink in your hand five seconds after leaving the bar before being approached about whether you’d finished.

No doubt, the push for carbon neutrality and minimising waste is a positive move, but being surrounded by fluoro can-collectors intent on nabbing my beverage, I couldn’t help but wonder if environmental focus was ruining the festival vibe?

One festival that's opted for carbon-neutrality is Splendour in the Grass, which last year released its green ticket: 31% of ticket purchasers opted for a carbon-neutral ticket supposedly neutralising travel emissions to and from the show.

The idea worked, with over 1000 tonnes of Co2 neutralised, and the money raised invested into renewable energy wind farms.

Splendour announced this month that this year, it would go one step further, with a goal to make the whole festival 100% Carbon Neutral. Tickets give audience members the opportunity to be carbon-neutral for the 48-hour duration of the festival, and not just travel emission neutral.

Splendour's organisers say that if two out of every three punters purchase a green ticket, the equivalent of 375 cars will be taken off the road. Very clever, but it comes at an extra cost of $7.

It’s not a lot of money, but the idea goes to the general question of whether going green is viable and affordable. How high will ticket prices go in the future? By the time you’ve bought your organic food, your hybrid car to get there and purchased ridiculously thin and scratchy roll of expensive recycled toilet paper, you’ve got a pretty pricey weekend on your hands.

The issue reminds me of this year’s Big Day Out. Upon first passing Lily World, I thought they’d stacked the empty beer boxes alongside the walls. In fact, this construction was a ‘recycled art installation’ - what appeared to be a Lego assembly of cardboard boxes. In all honesty, it looked cheap and nasty.

I also noticed that most signage was roughly written on ripped cardboard in what looked like finger paint. Perhaps organisers blew the creative budget on the wicked light installation in the Boiler Room, consisting of thousands of coloured globes in the shape of a cube – surely an energy efficient and non-carbon intensive installation. Go figure.

The environmentally conscious music festival is certainly a great concept. It brings whole new meaning to 'responsible partying'.

I’m not suggesting that we should ruthlessly consume, taking music festivals as an opportunity to flout environmental consciousness, but I do think next summer’s festivals will be interesting…

BYO toilet, mug and sandwich? Recycled bed sheet main stage? Solar-powered amplifiers? Too bad if it’s cloudy.

Been to a festival recently? Let us know what you think below.