Green-gigging: five ways fans can make live music more eco-friendly

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There’s a lot to consider when you’re gearing up for a gig or a festival. For the latter, did you Google the bands at the bottom of the bill so you can impress your mates with your cutting-edge music taste? Wait! Who packed the loo roll? Even a night out at your local venue isn’t without quandaries: how will you arrive early enough to avoid being stood behind the world’s tallest music fan? Which of your pals is limber enough to catch a drumstick or guitar pick?

And that’s before we get to the biggest issue of all, which is the imperative to attend gigs and festivals in the most environmentally friendly way possible. But how do you go about ‘green-gigging’? To find out more, we asked Roland Ellison, editor at Eco Experts, a website run by like-minded writers who help people to reduce their carbon footprint. Here’s what he had to tell us.

Don’t dump your tent like an eejit

“There are about a quarter of a million tents abandoned at UK festivals every year. That’s pretty gross – people just get up and go and leave their rubbish and tents onsite. When you can buy a tent for 20 quid – which is a round of drinks, basically – there’s the temptation to leave it there. That’s a big issue. So, please, make sure that if you bring your own tent, you pack it away and take it home with you and use it again.”

If possible, leave the car at home

“A lot of people drive to festivals like Glastonbury, but you can do it by coach. It’s down to festival organisers, as well, to work with transport operators to make sure that actually not driving is the easiest route. At Massive Attack’s recent sustainable Act 1.5 gig in Bristol, they had shuttle buses, which is often what you’ll see at, say, Cheltenham [horse racing] Festival, where they’ll ferry people back and forth from the station. As long as you make it easy for people and it’s laid on, it’s always going to be a better option.

“In football, when a game finishes at 10pm, there’ll often be no other way that an away fan can get back up to Liverpool or down to London afterwards apart from driving. There’s no Premier League club interaction with organisers and the rail services to make sure people are looked after. It’s a similar thing with promoters and organisers [of gigs and festivals]. As a fan, you can ask: ‘What are the non-car options for me?’ The more you’re requesting this stuff, it’s more pressure on the organisers to cater for this demand.”

Use the correct bins. It’s easy!

“Everyone sees at festivals now there’s a bin for your paper, there’s a bin for your food waste, there’s a bin for your tins and stuff. There’s been a lot of push to have less and less plastic. There’s not so much plastic on-site these days when you go to these things – it’s all wood cutlery and paper takeaway plates. They do make it quite easy for you to leave no trace. There’s not really any excuse to just dump stuff and leave it lying around.

“Glastonbury, for example, produces more than 2,000 tonnes of waste every year – and a big majority of that they are dealing with. They’re processing about 80 per cent of that into recycling and composting and whatever else. They’re doing as much as they can. As probably the leader and the benchmark in this, they were one of the first to have a wind turbine onsite. At the Massive Attack show, too, they had buckets to recycle batteries and disposable vapes, so that stuff isn’t just getting chucked on the floor.”

Remember your reusable water bottle

“Most Gen-Zers and millennials have their little stainless-steel bottles, but organisers need to make that easier as well, so there are always standpipes and water available for people to use, rather than buying plastic bottles. Two million plastic bottles are used and discarded at UK festivals annually. Think about one person and how many bottles or litres of water they’d have over a two or three-day period – every time you’re refilling your bottle of water, you’re saving a plastic bottle from going to recycling or landfill.”

Don’t pee on the land!

“Obviously, if you’ve got tens of thousands of people weeing in the same spot, it’s not great for the biodiversity of the festival grounds, so try and use the urinals. That goes for number twos as well – use long drops and compost loos, rather than leaving toilet paper in a bush. Sometimes people get caught short and these things happen, but try and be mindful about where you do your business!”

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