Coachella brings adrenaline-fueled sets to hundreds of thousands of festival-goers who gather in the California desert — and it also leaves behind a lot of trash.
Beyond the plastic cups and water bottles strewn about each day, there’s also the immense energy use of floodlights and earsplitting speakers.
Coachella is far from alone: music festivals across the United States and beyond are big business, and for all the talk of sustainability, the bottom line usually wins out.
The carbon footprint of throngs of people, along with artists and their entourages, traveling to attend such festivals should not be underestimated, says Kim Nicholas, a climate scholar at Sweden’s Lund University.
“That’s way bigger than the energy and waste use in production at the festival itself,” she told AFP.
“I think by far the most important step to make festivals truly low carbon and sustainable is to reduce the distance and the carbon intensity of travel.”
That’s not happening at Coachella, which is some three hours east of Los Angeles.
The festival does have a carpooling initiative rewarding those who arrive in groups by car.
Still, the fields surrounding the grounds are transformed into gargantuan parking lots with gridlocked traffic that lasts for days.
And the rare snowcaps on the San Jacinto Mountains that tower over the festival are an eerie reminder of California’s abnormal winter, which in the past months saw atmospheric rivers, near-record snow, flooding and fatalities.
Nicholas emphasizes that festivals should be located in areas easily reachable by public transportation; New York City’s Governor’s Ball, for example, was recently moved to Citi Field in Queens from a more remote island location.
The move was originally done to allow for more distancing in the era of Covid-19, but it stuck, not least due to easy subway access.
For Nicholas, artists should also take the initiative.
Musicians should make moves towards “promoting local tours, and making low-carbon travel desirable and sexy and cool,” she said. “It’s kind of the reverse of flying by private jet, and seeing that as a past social goal or aspiration.”
Turkish-born, LA-based DJ Omer Mesci, who played a set at the festival, agrees: “As artists we have an audience and we have a voice, and people tend to listen to us.”
Some acts have made moves: Coldplay at one point halted touring for environmental reasons — though they picked back up recently — and Massive Attack called for “an urgent and significant reassembly” of the industry after commissioning a study into live music’s climate impact.
– ‘Minimizing our footprint’ –
A recent report from the town of Indio, where the festival is held, said just 20 percent of total waste is recycled at Coachella as well as organizer Goldenvoice’s other festivals including Stagecoach.
Much of the Coachella festival’s efforts are centered on selling beverages in aluminum rather than plastic, and offering water refill…
