An article in Village Voice reports the sad conclusion that music festivals are environmental disasters, and it is really not a surprise! 100,000 or more people gathered in the same place for a few days, consuming, drinking, smoking,…. And of course driving their cars to get there. I have never been to Coachella, but I wouldn’t be very found of this long drive, these hours and hours stuck in the traffic – it is usually a 2-hour drive but you can count up many more hours during the days of the festival! Some people even said it took them 2 hours to get out of the parking lot, and all that gas emission is an ecological disaster.
Plus, the current trend is bigger, always bigger, and Coachella is now spreading on 2 weekends. Just imagine all these plastic bottles piling up after such a crowd and the Village Voice reports that most festivals don’t make any big efforts to be green! My experience at FYF fest just confirms this, with overflowing trash cans everywhere, although things were more in control at much smaller festivals with bins for recycling cans and compost… but the size crowd couldn’t be compared, when you reach these Coachella numbers, things become tricky. The other good thing I saw was a water fountain, which was allowing people to fill up their bottles instead of purchasing another one. It was sure less money for the festival, but a much more ecological way to proceed.
According to the Village Voice, Lightning in a Bottle is probably the greener of all festivals with stages made of recycled materials, a solar-energy-powered-event (partially but still a very good idea), organic food vendors and a green team sorting waste. Plus buses travel to the site and solo car drivers are penalized and have to pay $30. Like Lightning in a Bottle, Milwaukee’s zero-emissions Rock the Green festval and Nevada’s Symbiosis Gathering were also praised by UK-based A Greener Festival, a non-profit organization in charge of judging how ecological these events are.
More and more festivals are making some efforts to follow these good examples, like Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, Nevada’s Burning Man, but not Coachella!! Why? It’s in California and we are supposed to be a green state, right? For example they have noticed that ‘the recycling, compost, and trash bins are confusingly labeled, and as a result many have been piled high with garbage’,.. how complicated can this be?
But there is worst than Coachella, and the surprise is that the dirtiest festivals are the EDM events such as Electric Daisy Carnival and Hard, which don’t have good recycling programs. Another good reason for not attending them!
Music festivals may have this hippie-spirit at core, but most of them are far from being earth friendly, I am always appalled when I look at the ground after a show in a regular theater, it always looks like trash, and the worst disaster I saw may have been after this Refused set at the FYF fest last year! There were no words to describe these mountains of things littering the ground! As festivals multiply and grow bigger every year, it’s about time they straighten things up!