Category: News

“There will always be the peace, the love and the music, but the legacy of any large music festival will also always include a heap of trash. For 50 years, oceans of waste have washed over fields from Bethel, New York to Indio, California to Somerset, England. And though this garbage isn’t the worst driver of climate change, it’s only in the past few decades that festival organizers have committed to keeping things cleaner.

This year, Glastonbury, the U.K.’s biggest festival with a five-day annual attendance of 200,000, will ban the sale of single-use plastic bottles and eliminate them entirely from their backstage areas. Vendors, instead, will be allowed to sell canned sodas and water; and though attendees will not be prohibited from bringing their own plastic bottles, officials are strongly encouraging them to bring a reusable bottle instead…”

“It may not feel like it now, but the summer festival season is right around the corner—and then it will be gone again all too soon, and music fans will be left with nothing but the memories. And the venues will be left with garbage. Lots and lots of garbage.

But that’s starting to change.

In past years, for example, the aftermath of the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival has resembled a poorly managed garbage dump—thanks in no small part to an estimated 1.3 million single-use plastic bottles sold during the five-day event…”

“When a powerhouse like Katy Perry speaks, folks tend to pay attention. Just ask Aran Rush, VP of arena operations at the sustainable concert venue Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, California.  

“We did have plastic straws for our general population, because we were still nervous about transitioning over,” said Rush when discussing the venue’s environmentally-friendly practices. “But we used plant-based straws everywhere else. And then we had Katy Perry come and she asked us to switch over. And ever since she came in January, we switched over to only plant-based straws,” he continued. “Sometimes you just need a little spark to start it…”

“Singer, songwriter, and musician Jack Johnson is known for his soothing melodies and go-with-the-flow personality. But when it comes to plastic pollution tainting the ocean, Johnson refuses to go with the flow.

As a surfer and someone who was born and raised on Hawaii, Johnson spends much of his time in the ocean. Over the years, he has seen the beaches near his home become more and more junked up with litter. So he has begun to speak out about the issue, and work on it through his foundation, Kokua Hawaii Foundation…”

“The world’s largest concert promoter and the world’s most influential festival have each teamed up with ocean protection group Lonely Whale to ban plastic straws, which result in thousands of tons of seawater pollution each year.

Live Nation now is an official Global Stakeholder of Lonely Whale’s “For A Strawless Ocean” campaign and has committed to removing all single-use plastic straws in favor of a marine-friendly paper alternative at the company’s 45 owned and operated amphitheaters across the U.S. Meanwhile, Goldenvoice — organizers of this weekend’s Coachella festival and next weekend’s Stagecoach festival — have also phased out plastic straws from their events and will be the first festivals in North America to go 100 percent straw-free…”

“Every person reading this has used a plastic bottle, many of whom likely used one in the past day or week. Plastic, in the recent decades, has become a staple of convenience and a modern lifestyle. The surge in plastic bottle use has accompanied a desire for bottled water as Asia has modernized its lifestyle.

Several recent reports indicate the dire global situation associated with the world’s plastic use. Two statistics jump out immediately. One, that globally humans buy a million plastic bottles per minute. The second, 91% of all plastic is not recycled. On top of that, it is estimated that over half a trillion plastic bottles will be sold in 2020…“

“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the stats: Plastic is flooding our world. Our oceans bear the burden of five continent-sized mass accumulations of plastic, and unless our ravenous consumption of it changes, scientists predict there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans by 2050.

How much garbage does a typical music festival generate? The 2015 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, with roughly 90,000 attendees in Tennessee, produced more than 679 tons of waste over four days. That’s 15 pounds of waste per festival-goer — nearly twice the average amount a U.S. consumer uses daily. The biggest component of that waste was single-use disposable plastic: water bottles, beer cups, straws, utensils, wrappers and packaging…“

“You hear all these horror stories of people’s riders requesting one color of M&Ms or super fancy champagne,” the 40-year-old singer recently told The Huffington Post. “We just figured, all right, let’s be demanding with these, because we know they’re not going to switch back to those energy-draining bulbs once the show is over.”

For Johnson, the riders are a way to chip away at the huge impact the concert industry has on the planet…”

“The sustainability panel was packed with attendees – quite the contrast to the experience Effect Partners founder/CEO Mike Martin had at his first Pollstar conference, where he was at a little booth and nobody came to talk to him. 

Sure, this year’s panel had the star appeal of Jack Johnson, but more than that, sustainability has become a way of life for many people. Santa Barbara Bowl event operations director Eric Shiflett said he’s “seeing the market pressure switch from top down to bottom up a little bit more. People are making the right choices and forcing us to make the changes rather than us trying to force them to make behavioral changes.”

Jack Johnson said his fans inspired him to get involved in the greening of the music industry…“

“There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say. And if it was bagged upand arranged across all of the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea…“