Coldplay’s sustainability goals include reducing consumption, minimizing waste, and cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent. Coldplay performs at the Rose Bowl, Sept. 30, 2023, in Pasadena, Calif.Chris Pizzello/The Canadian Press
After Coldplay’s two shows in Vancouver in September, 2023, the team at BC Place got their hands dirty. Literally. At the request of the band, the venue’s staff hand sorted the waste produced from the shows, something that was above and beyond the waste management system already in place.
“That meant bringing in more people from our haulage company and waste sorting to help us. It meant that we collected all of the garbage in the venue and then dumped it all, spread it out, hand sorted it with our teams, and then repacked it into the right bins to ensure that we were getting maximum waste diversion,” says Chris May, general manager of BC Place.
The band provided some funding to support the efforts. It’s something that aligns with Coldplay’s own sustainability goals, which include reducing consumption, minimizing waste, and cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent.
For May and the team at BC Place, it showed them what’s possible for their own operations. “We have a goal to hit at the stadium – 90 per cent waste diversion in 2025. We saw a 40-per-cent increase in 2023 in our waste diversion from our 2020 levels. So we’re moving in the right direction,” he says. “What Coldplay showed us is that we can really do it, that 90 per cent isn’t too high, that with the right moves we’re going to get there.”
Other bands are also advancing what’s possible for sustainability efforts when performing live. This summer, Massive Attack made international headlines for Act 1.5, its one-day festival in Bristol, England, so named as a nod to the call to cap global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees at the 2015 Paris Agreement. The show was powered entirely by renewable energy, the band used electric vehicles to transport gear, local residents were given priority in ticket sales to minimize long-distance travel, and there was no parking lot at the venue to encourage folks to take public transit to the show.
Adam Gardner, co-founder and co-executive director of U.S.-based environmental non-profit Reverb, has been working with musicians to minimize the environmental footprints of their performances since 2004. But it was the pause offered by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that spurred a big shift in the industry. “Live music came to a screeching halt, and I think it gave everybody an opportunity to reflect on what we were doing,” he says.
The Reverb team works with acts such as Dave Matthews Band, Billie Eilish, Barenaked Ladies and Shawn Mendes to minimize the impact of their tours and educate fans about the small actions they can take that contribute to greater change. On Eilish’s current world tour, Reverb and the singer’s crew are encouraging fans to bring empty reusable bottles to fill up with complementary water at the venues, promoting public transit routes to venues and ensuring all tour venues offer plant-based food options.
The Reverb team works with acts like Shawn Mendes to minimize the impact of their tours and educate fans about the small actions they can take that contribute to greater change. Shawn Mendes performs during the Corona Capital music festival in Mexico City, on Nov. 16.Eduardo Verdugo/The Associated Press
Among the efforts of Eilish’s crew, they have also banned single-use plastics backstage, compost any food waste, collect unused toiletries from their hotel stays to donate to local shelters, having a strict no idling policy for their vehicles and gather any functional camping gear left by fans to donate to organizations supporting homeless populations.
Reverb also sets up what it calls Eco-Action Villages at every tour stop to educate fans, and have them pledge to eat one plant-based meal a day, for instance, or connect with a local climate-focused charity in their community.
Smaller acts, who don’t have the budget or influence to implement such changes, are doing what they can. Michael Bright is a member of the Toronto-based indie rock band Dead Broke. The group brings reusable bottles, cups and dinnerware with them on the road to avoid single-use plastics. They avoid takeout whenever possible to minimize packaging waste, and at one point on tour, the band was sponsored by a coffee roaster that enabled them to make their own brew (all of this helped with their own budget as well).
But for bigger climate impacts, they’re relying on venues to take the lead. “Sustainability is not always the first thing you’re thinking of. You pull up on site, and it’s ‘Okay, are we on time? Where do we put the gear? Where do we park the van? Are we running late? Is anyone showing up? Is the rain gonna hold off today?’” He cites festivals like Alberta’s North Country Fair and Riverfest in Elora, Ont., as examples of events that are actively taking sustainability steps for both talent and fans – like promoting reusable bottles, offering free water refill stations and co-ordinating shuttles to the venue to discourage driving.
It’s venues and festivals that Reverb is increasingly focusing time on. The organization’s biggest project to date is its Music Decarbonization Project, the goal of which, Gardner says, is in the project’s name. “Historically, a lot of this was, ‘Okay, let’s measure some carbon footprints, and then we’ll spend money on offsetting.’ And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with supporting projects elsewhere that bring down carbon because it is a global issue,” he says. “But it doesn’t motivate us to change our ways. We need to both support these projects and lower our own carbon footprints. We can’t simply throw money at it and say, ‘Okay, we’re good.’”
Working with festivals, the project provides battery power to avoid the use of diesel generators, which significantly cuts carbon emissions. The 2024 edition of Healing Appalachia was a 100-per-cent battery-powered event, as was Portola 2024. Together those events avoided more than 50 tonnes of carbon emissions (the annual per capita emissions in Canada is 17.7 tonnes). At Lollapalooza in 2023, Eilish performed her headline set on a solar-powered stage.
“We really just started this campaign in earnest last year, and we’ve made huge progress in just that year by proof of concepts on large-scale stages,” Gardner says. This year, Lollapalooza and Willie Nelson’s Luck festival both employed the battery technology themselves.
Despite how far everything has come in the past few years, everyone agrees there’s still much to be done, particularly around fan travel to shows – a major source of emissions. In Vancouver, BC Place has a partnership with TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transit system, to promote access to the stadium via transit or bicycle.
That’s something the Reverb team is working on as well, though Gardner admits that this is something beyond the scope of his organization. “It’s going to require municipalities to get involved,” he says. “What we’ve heard from fans is that they are willing to do it. But those options aren’t as available and aren’t promoted.”
