Are concerts hitting the right green note?
That concert you’ve been looking forward to for months, is it something else you need to feel guilty about? Let’s take a Deep Dive.
🎶 Concerts have a big environmental impact. Their biggest issues are the transportation of fans and artists, powering venues and the waste they generate.
♻️ There are, however, ways of mitigating those, from using sustainable energy sources to implementing waste reduction strategies.
🤘 Individual musicians are taking action, but there’s also an alphabet soup of industry bodies trying to do something about it.
QUOTABLE
“When the band started to become successful, I’d leave a concert venue and see the amount of garbage left behind, and I realised that we had to do something or we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. I can’t in good conscience tell anyone the planet is in peril and that they should do something about it unless I’m doing everything I think is possible.”
- Dave Matthews, musician and activist
BY THE NUMBERS
166 Taylor Swift spent 166 hours flying in her private jet just during the US leg of her current Eras Tour. An hour in a private jet generates about 2 tonnes of carbon emissions.
5 The average festival-goer generates about 5kg of emissions a day. That equates to about 48,000 tonnes a year.
1,000 A small concert might use about 10kW of power or possibly as little as 6kW. But a really big one can use up to 1,000kW, enough to power a town.
QUIZ
What proportion of the 97 tonnes of solid waste generated each day at the leading US festival Coachella gets recycled?
A. 20 percent
B. 40 percent
C. 60 percent
Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
DID YOU KNOW?
Concerts don’t just contribute to climate change. Increasingly, they’re affected by it too.
THE EDIT
🔊 What events can do. Here are some of the steps organisers of concerts can take to go greener.
🎸 What musicians are doing. The world’s most popular acts are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. Some have even started publishing sustainability audits of their tours.
🤷 But are we bothered? Does the music industry’s growing enthusiasm for climate action have much impact in Asia?
THE FULL PICTURE
Venues and audience travel are by far the biggest elements of concerts’ environmental impact, each contributing about a third to the carbon footprint of a tour.
KEY PLAYER
Pearl Jam
British band Radiohead are often credited as sustainability pioneers among musicians. They have been trying to make their tours carbon-neutral since 2008. But US grunge rockers Pearl Jam have offset all their tour emissions since 2003 and are highly transparent about what they do.
HONOUREE TO KNOW
Kyla Liang
Kyla Liang established Spaceport Carnival in Taiwan, a zero-waste, sustainable event that plants a tree for each ticket sold. She spent a decade in the live music event industry in Shanghai, bringing major international festivals such as Road To Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival to the city.
ONE FINAL THING
There is one very direct way concerts can offset some of the energy they use, by generating some of their own from their customers using kinetic dancefloors.
