By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007
Concert promoters, venues and artists are increasingly going green, teaming up to reduce or eliminate the environmental impact of their industry and raising awareness about green products, technologies and issues by utilizing the strong connection between artists and their fan bases.
The basic message: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
For the multibillion-dollar concert business, that means:
· Staging carbon-neutral concerts using green energy sources whenever possible or purchasing carbon offsets for energy used, such as planting trees to help with future carbon reduction.
· Relying on clean-burning, domestically made biodiesel fuel to power tour buses and trucks and even stage generators.
· Providing on-site recycling.
· Offering biodegradable food services and reusable or recyclable cups, plates and utensils.
In the next few weeks, Save Our Selves -- the Campaign for a Climate Crisis, the organization staging the 24-hour Live Earth global event July 7, will introduce the Green Event Standard, which will be usable industry-wide, from small venues to larger arenas and stadiums. Live Earth, whose broadcast could reach more than 2 billion people worldwide, will implement many green practices, including sourcing all electricity from renewable sources (utility-supplied renewable energy, biodiesel generators, renewable energy credits), issuing carbon credits for air travel by staff and artists, and reducing waste from concessions. The final leg from Giants Stadium in New Jersey will be the country's first "green" stadium event.
When the Live Earth concerts were announced in April by former vice president Al Gore, he said: "This will be the largest musical event in history and the beginning of the biggest change we've ever had to make. But we have to really make a commitment to this change, and that's what Live Earth is designed to kick off."
About the same time, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, by far the area's busiest summer venue, announced "a complete assessment of [its] environmental footprint," with plans to minimize the park's impact, "eventually positioning Wolf Trap as an environmental model and resource for arts presenters across the country."
For guidance, Wolf Trap need look no further than its July 31 headliner, Guster. Adam Gardner, guitarist for the indie-rock band, and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, who has a degree in environmental education, founded Reverb in 2004. The Portland, Maine-based nonprofit group advises bands and venues on environmentally friendly options. Among the tours Reverb is "greening" this summer are those of John Mayer, the Fray, Tim McGraw & Faith Hill and the Dave Matthews Band.
Greening can involve large festivals as well. The upcoming Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, June 14-17 in Manchester, Tenn., will recycle 250 tons of festival garbage into construction material and park benches to be used at future events. The recent Coachella festival featured split trash cans -- recyclables in one part, trash in the other -- allowing organizers to collect 90 percent of the recyclable material. At England's upcoming Glastonbury Festival, each ticket holder will get a free, environmentally friendly roll of toilet paper; about 150,000 rolls will be handed out in a bid to encourage people not to bring their own.
There are smaller gestures as well, including selling concert and band T-shirts made with organic cotton or hemp and gathering broken and used instrument strings from the stage after shows to be recycled into jewelry, as Barenaked Ladies do.
The Vans Warped Tour's 19 trucks and 17 buses run on biodiesel fuel, and, tour founder Kevin Lyman says, "our industry is going to have to adapt to change to be able to survive. We're bringing 3,000 gallons of biodiesel a day on site, which costs a little bit more, but we're going to absorb the cost of delivery."
This is the fourth year for the tour's ever-expanding Warped Eco Initiatives, and "we're slowly learning how to do it," Lyman says. "It's not an overnight process. We started with recycling three summers ago. I recycle at home. I thought, 'Why are we not doing it out on the road?' I believe the only real change is going to come from the 12- to 19-year-olds of the world. If we don't do something, their lives are going to be more affected by it than myself or my parents who have grown up in this consumer nation." (A 2006 MTV/CBS News Poll of 13- to 24-year-olds found them citing the environment as the most important problem their generation will have to deal with.)
Terrence D. Jones, Wolf Trap president and chief executive, has appointed former transportation secretary Norman Y. Mineta as chairman of the new National Advisory Council for the Arts and Environment. As the National Park Service's only performing arts center, Wolf Trap was already green-conscious, using biodegradable products at its concession stands and subsidizing the Wolf Trap Metro Shuttle to encourage and provide public transportation to shows. The future will include transitioning to alternative fuel and high-efficiency vehicles, purchasing wind credits to offset carbon emissions and moving to becoming a paperless operation, with the ultimate goal of making the park, according to Wolf Trap officials, "a zero waste organization and carbon neutral."
Willie Nelson, who'll be at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Sept. 6, has a three-year-old company, Willie Nelson BioDiesel, and his own trucker-friendly blend called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. His latest tour bus, Honeysuckle Rose IV, runs on BioWillie; what Willie runs on is also organic.
The Dave Matthews Band, at Nissan Pavilion on Aug. 11, also uses biodiesel and works with NativeEnergy to offset the climate impact of emissions from its tours. The band has also invested enough money into renewable energy to offset its fossil fuel use for the past 15 years.
Meanwhile, Save Our Selves has partnered with the U.S. Green Building Commission, creators of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard, and award-winning sustainability expert John Picard on the Green Event Standard, which will offer how-to guidelines for production managers, venue managers, merchandisers and artists.
Live Nation and AEG, the two dominant concert production companies, are working on green initiatives as well.
Guster's Gardner says: "Every year, the demand from artists, and now other entities in the music industry, to go green has been unbelievable, and overwhelming. Venues and bands don't know what to do. Sometimes there's a disconnect between intentions and actions, and a lot of it has to do with that it's not their main priority. When you're a band, you're just so busy, and everyone who's out there on the road, their plate is full with their job."
But that's changing, and beginning last year, Guster has done several Campus Consciousness tours featuring eco-villages. Gardner calls them "part eco-science fair, part environmental showcases" and part promotion for such tour sponsors as organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farms and Ben & Jerry's.
There are also town hall forums and "Pimp My Clean Ride," in which students are invited aboard Guster's tour bus to learn about biodiesel, alternative transportation "and the nontoxic, eco-friendly products we use on the bus," Gardner says.
The Guster bus was once dubbed "the Earth eater," but switching to biodiesel has allowed Guster to keep 100,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a single year. And through its offsets, the band says, 2,100 tons of carbon dioxide have been neutralized -- the equivalent of not driving 4.2 million miles or powering 262 homes for an entire year.
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