In Nashville this past August, about 5,000 revelers in neon chaps, gothic chains and kaleidoscopic crop tops descended on Bicentennial Park for an electronic music festival. They gyrated to pulsating sets by the British D.J. Chris Lake and the electronic duo Snakehips. They watched choreographed light shows and got massages in a healers’ village.
And after they raised their arms within the air, a lot of them flashed a green wristband, signifying a commitment to partying in a way that was carbon neutral.
Billed because the “greenest festival” within the country, Deep Tropics had no trash cans (though there have been loads of recycling and compost bins), and single-use plastics were banned. Festival organizers said that every one the carbon consumed for the two-day event (including the fuel utilized by all of the festivalgoers) might be offset by the planting of some 23,000 trees.
“We’re the subsequent generation of festivals,” said Blake Atchison, 39, who founded Deep Tropics in 2017 together with his twin brother, Joel Atchison. “We try to be on the innovative of technology and culture and sustainability and art.”
Traditional music festivals devour numerous resources. The sound systems and lights alone guzzle tons of power. Larger festivals like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland draw tons of of 1000’s of revelers, who use energy to get there and leave behind mountains of waste. What isn’t carried in by hand must be trucked in.
And that’s not counting the D.J.s. A 2021 report by Clean Scene, a climate collective in Berlin, found that 1,000 of the highest D.J.s together took greater than 51,000 flights in a single 12 months, emitting 35 million tons of carbon dioxide — corresponding to the quantity of power consumed by 20,000 households.
But there’s a novel push by eco-minded organizers to make festivals greener, sometimes through smaller, feel-good initiatives like compost toilets and vegan food trucks. Others are striving for greater impact by offsetting their carbon emissions, or tapping dancers’ body heat to power their heating and cooling systems.
“There’s pressure on festivals, especially because they’re such large events,” said Fallon MacWilliams, 37, a D.J. and promoter in Berlin who’s one in every of the three founders of Clean Scene. “This 12 months while touring I saw numerous festivals changing the best way they’re doing things on the subject of plastic and inspiring artists to take trains to the festival.”
Vision: 2025, a nonprofit in Bristol, England, has gotten greater than 40 festivals in Britain to pledge to chop their emissions in half and double their recycling rates by 2025. Daybreaker, which organizes sober dance parties worldwide, hosts a series of morning raves where single-use plastics are prohibited and public transportation is inspired.
Some festival organizers say the changes have to be more systemic. Music festivals are “completely depending on low-cost flights and due to this fact the consumption of fossil fuels,” said Eilidh McLaughlin, 35, a founding father of Clean Scene. “Any effort to advance sustainability is basically greenwashing unless you’re working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably.”
In 2020, DGTL, a company in Amsterdam that produces electronic music festivals, pledged to be climate neutral. “We try to create a recent festival landscape where sustainability might be the norm,” said Mitchell van Dooijeweerd, 31, the sustainability manager for DGTL. “It’s grow to be a business model, because we’re experts on this and everybody wants to vary.”
For this 12 months’s Deep Tropics, the organizers teamed with Green Disco, an organization in Recent York that helps events grow to be environmentally friendlier. Throughout the festival, its founders Jonah Geschwind, 22, and Jacob Chandler, 21, stood at the doorway and sold $20 “eco-bands”: green wristbands that funded the planting of trees and other environmental causes.
“Should you make sustainability easy and as cool as possible, persons are going to naturally adopt it,” said Mr. Chandler, who said they sold about 500 bracelets, which he estimates will offset 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Larger festivals are also making efforts: Coachella has increased vegan food options, urged its attendees to automotive pool and pledged to slash emissions; Burning Man announced a 10-year sustainability road map in 2019.
And a few music acts try, too. Coldplay has pledged that its current tour will create half as much greenhouse gas emissions as its previous one. The band can also be touring with a kinetic dance floor that uses human movement to create electricity. The ground was a previous attraction at Club Watt, a dance club in Rotterdam that’s now closed.
Still, real-world practicalities sometimes get in the best way. At this 12 months’s Burning Man there have been 12-hour traffic jams, leaving ravers stuck in hot, idling cars while Nevada temperatures crept above 100 degrees. And at Deep Tropics, some vendors used plastic packaging despite signing pledges.
That doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made, said Heather White, 49, an environmental scientist in Bozeman, Mont., and founding father of the nonprofit One Green Thing.
“From a 30,000-foot level, does all this matter?” she said. “It absolutely matters. These electronic music festivals are drivers of culture change. We now have to have these living laboratories, where people can see zero waste at a concert, because without culture change, big policy solutions will not be going to work.”
