If you attended a music festival in Ireland or Britain this summer, there is a good chance the waste you left behind was gathered by a cleaning company from Tipperary.
Ryans Cleaning turned over close to €12 million last year owing to year-round operations like racecourse and theatre cleaning, as well as their events and festivals department that, over the summer, facilitated the likes of Coldplay, Electric Picnic and Creamfields in Ireland and Britain.
“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.”
Kelly is the daughter of Pat and Philomena Ryan, who established their cleaning business 40 years ago, initially servicing schools and local offices in Thurles.
In the early 1990s, the Trip to Tipp festival began running in Semple Stadium. The first féile was a seminal one for Irish music, paving the way for larger and more ambitious music events on the island. For Ryans Cleaning, it was a catalyst for expansion.
“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.”
Though Kelly has been chief executive for more than a year she still attends events and occasionally fills in as a shift manager on-site. It presents an opportunity to meet clients and point to the work being carried out.
‘Hospitality demand is there, but there is no margin anymore’“I love being out there on the ground with everyone,” she says. “Operations is my favourite part of the business. Being out there, meeting people, being heavily involved. Our clients love that they also meet me out on the ground as well.”
Electric Picnic has been a cornerstone of the company’s summer schedule since the festival began in 2004. This year, a record 75,000 people were in attendance. The cleaning process has evolved.
“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.
“We use two different types of machines. One is pulled behind a tractor and it’s almost like a beach cleaner. It collects the heavier rubbish on the overnight cleans.
“Then we also have a self-driving suction machine. I explain it like a vacuum cleaner on wheels. That comes behind the tractor and the other machine, and it sucks up more rubbish. Then litter pickers come behind that to get the finer, small bits left behind.”
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.
“In the UK this year, for the first time, we did on-site sorting of some materials,” says Kelly. “We had balers and a small picking line to pull out the aluminium cans so that they could be sent separately. They went directly to a recycling facility specifically for those materials. We did the same with cardboard and the same with soft plastic.”
After any big weekend festival, videos are usually shared online of ragged tents left behind by attendees. Kelly is quick to point out that any reusable tents are collected by local charities, while the unsalvageable materials also serve a purpose.
“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.”
About 50 per cent of Ryans Cleaning’s operation is now based in Britain. Before Covid, the business had a permanent office in Birmingham but it became an unmanageable expense during the pandemic. Finding a new base will be key to beefing up the company’s calendar in the UK.
“The majority of the work we do over there happens between May and September,” says Kelly. “We have people on the ground now in the UK in order to expand into similar venues to what we have here in Ireland — racecourses, indoor music venues, stadiums, all that side of it.”
Plans for a move further into Europe were also put on hold, but Kelly hopes they can be revisited in 2025.
It is a long way from the outfit that sprang up in Thurles four decades ago.
“When they set up the business, they never thought it would go to what it is now,” she says of her parents. “[Dad] would never have dreamed of it going as far as it went. And it’s still going.”