Trip to Tipp occasion catalyst for turning small office cleaning firm in Tipperary into €12m international operation
“People come and enjoy the concert and it’s clean during the concert, and we clean it overnight so it’s clean for the next day,” says Aisling Kelly, chief executive of Ryans Cleaning. “People forget that there’s also a big operation after the event finishes and all the fun is over.” “I was born in 1989 so when they started the festivals, I was still very small,” Kelly says. “But we were always there. Mam and Dad used to bring all of us as kids to the festivals with them when they were working ... I was 12, 13 years of age and I was handing out rubbish bags to people. Or we were helping Mam with a small bit of cleaning anywhere on-site.”
“Back then, our clean-up operation would have been massively labour intensive,” Kelly says. “Nowadays, there’s new technology out there and new equipment out there. We use a lot of machinery and overnight cleans to collect the rubbish at night-time. Things like that have changed. Where possible in Ireland, festivals like Electric Picnic avoid single-use plastic and encourage the use of compostable materials. Britain is further ahead in the equipment it makes available to events cleaning crews, she says.
“It’s shredded down into small, fine pieces and it’s used as a fuel for creating electricity; in some places, it’s used in cement kilns,” she says of tents that cannot be reused. “So, none of it actually goes to landfill at all.”