The Music Industry’s Battle Against Plastic Junk
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.
The good news is that a movement is growing within the music industry to amend the harm being done by plastic pollution. Musicians and festivals are embracing change and committing to reduce their plastic and carbon footprints, on stage and behind the scenes.
This is not just a waste issue. The vast majority of disposable plastic is still manufactured from crude oil and natural gas — nonrenewable fossil fuels. With every plastic bottle we toss in the bin and every granola bar wrapper we tear open, we are contributing to the urgent problem of climate change.
How can we change?
Touring music and arts festivals are like miniature cities built in one location for a short performance, then dismantled, transported many miles and rebuilt in another city, where they’ll be flooded with temporary residents for a long weekend and then abandoned again. They are enormous nomadic tableaus of creative energy, and they are also islands of trash, mostly plastic. But such a space for art, collaboration and demonstration — combined with a captive, energetic audience — provides an opportunity to develop and refine a model toward sustainability, and touring artists are using their unique influence to help festival organizers reach that goal.
Jack Johnson and his wife Kim have not only worked to eliminate disposable plastic on all of his tours, but the pair co-founded the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation in Hawaii to promote social change in communities. The Johnsons also partnered with RPM, Reverb and other groups to form the Sustainable Concerts Working Group, which produces guidance and best practices to help interested artists or venues do their part to reduce plastic.
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