Trazee In-Depth: Socially Conscious and Eco-Friendly Festivals

With the longer days and warmer weather of summer comes the long-awaited music festival season. More than 40 million music fans flock to summer festivals across the United States every summer wearing flower crowns and spreading peace, love and good vibes.

With such a wanderlust aesthetic and pro-nature vibe portrayed by festival production companies and attendees, it’s interesting to see what these venues actually do to make the festival theme a reality for the environment.

Every year, Coachella draws tens of thousands of music fans to Coachella Valley inIndio, Calif. This year the venue was expanded by more than 40 acres to accommodate another 30,000 fans, totaling more than 126,000 attendees over one weekend and more than 250,000 over the course of the festival. With so many bodies, tents, camping gear, cars, food and beverage trucks, showers and additional camping accoutrements in place for the epic event, what is being done to promote sustainable living and eco-friendly practices?

Providing incentives for accountability is a large part of how Coachella Valley stays sustainable during festival season. Guests that carpool with four or more friends are automatically entered to win VIP passes to Coachella for life as a way to cut down commuter gas emissions.

Coachella also provides an energy playground for festivalgoers to charge up with manually generated energy. Hop on the energy factory seesaw and generate power for your devices as you ride, or take to the saving nature claw machine to learn about endangered species through games. Recycling is a huge aspect of Coachella’s sustainable efforts. For recycling 10 plastic water bottles, guests receive one water bottle — helping Coachella campgrounds save millions of bottles every year.

Sustainability volunteers are known to swoop in after festivals that draw an immense crowd of artists and partiers to clean up any and all litter. Despite the enormous efforts made by city planners and production companies, there is bound to be leftover from such a raucous event.

One of the first music festivals to delve into the eco-friendly movement was Splendor in the Grass. The July festival held in Byron, Australia, is a fan favorite and enlists the help of ticket sales to improve the environment. Festivalgoers can offset their carbon footprint by paying extra for their ticket. Guests plan trees on site at the Splendor in the Grass Festival, with more than 2,000 trees planted at the 2016 event. The Aussie festival goes so far as to provide gas-fired low-flow showers, rainwater roof collection points, green tent options and compost toilets.

Lollapalooza attendees enjoy local farmers market goods and support local artists, retailers and the environment — all while attending amazing live performances. Ticketholders can purchase an energy tag from the event’s Green Mountain to offset carbon and collect recyclables from the park in exchange for a free festival t-shirt.

Other top festivals, like Glastonbury, Wood Festival, Le Paléo, Wanderlust, Lightening in a Bottle and Les Vieilles, Charrues, all follow a strict no-trace policy. This promise ensures the festival grounds will be left visibly untouched by pollution, litter and any damages potentially caused by the festival. Leaving the space as they found it, if not better, is a growing trend in the festival community and has become the new standard for events of this caliber.

Another industry standard of the music festival circuit is shopping small. Most, if not all large festival venues, offer locally sourced produce and ingredients prepared by local chefs and restaurants. By shopping small, guests give back to the local economy and cut out third-party corporations.

The proactive eco-actions such as planting trees, composting, purifying water and using solar-powered energy to stay in touch promotes sustainable practices even after the festival has ended. Part of the enjoyment of a music festival is the pure escapism. Guests are transported to a makeshift society running on clean green energy, sustainably prepared meals, carbon footprint reduction, active care for the environment and little waste and excess.

During festival activities, the eco-friendly focus is encouraging and leaves a lasting impression on guests and artists. Many artists adopted the green energy drive and revamped their tours to be more environmentally friendly.

From Adele and Dave Matthews Band to U2, Neil Diamond, Sheryl Crow, Linkin Park, Green Day, The Roots, Bats for Lashes and many others strive to use green energy while traveling, shop small while touring, give back to communities along the tour and work with non-profit production companies, striving to lower carbon footprints and support sustainable lifestyles.

Lollapalooza: https://www.lollapalooza.com

Glastonbury: http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

Wood Festival: http://www.woodfestival.com

Le Paléo: http://yeah.paleo.ch

Wanderlust: https://wanderlust.com

Lightning in a Bottle: http://lightninginabottle.org

Les Vieilles, Charrues https://www.vieillescharrues.asso.fr/

More about Music Festival’s Eco-friendly practices: https://livenation.vice.com/en_us/article/how-eco-friendly-are-music-festivals-really

Artists Going Green:http://www.rollingstone.com/artists-going-green#cloud-cult