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    Music Festivals Try to Go Green and Carbon Neutral

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    A handful of festivals are striving to become carbon neutral by reducing waste, using high-tech dance floors and offsetting emissions.In Nashville this past August, about 5,000 revelers in neon chaps, gothic chains and kaleidoscopic crop tops descended on Bicentennial Park for an electronic music festival. They gyrated to pulsating sets by the British D.J. Chris Lake and the electronic duo Snakehips. They watched choreographed light shows and got massages in a healers’ village.And when they raised their arms in the air, many of them flashed a green wristband, signifying a commitment to partying in a way that was carbon neutral.Billed as the “greenest festival” in the country, Deep Tropics had no trash cans (though there were plenty of recycling and compost bins), and single-use plastics were banned. Festival organizers said that all the carbon consumed for the two-day event (including the fuel used by all the festivalgoers) will be offset by the planting of some 23,000 trees.“We’re the next generation of festivals,” said Blake Atchinson, 39, who founded Deep Tropics in 2017 with his twin brother, Joel Atchinson. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art.”The festival was founded by Blake and Joel Atchison. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art,” Blake said. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesTraditional music festivals consume a lot of resources. The sound systems and lights alone guzzle tons of power. Bigger festivals like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland draw hundreds of thousands of revelers, who use energy to get there and leave behind mountains of waste. What isn’t carried in by hand needs to be trucked in.And that’s not counting the D.J.s. A 2021 report by Clean Scene, a climate collective in Berlin, found that 1,000 of the top D.J.s together took more than 51,000 flights in a single year, emitting 35 million tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the amount of power consumed by 20,000 households.But there is a novel push by eco-minded organizers to make festivals greener, sometimes through smaller, feel-good initiatives like compost toilets and vegan food trucks. Others are striving for bigger impact by offsetting their carbon emissions, or tapping dancers’ body heat to power their heating and cooling systems.“There’s pressure on festivals, especially because they’re such large events,” said Fallon MacWilliams, 37, a D.J. and promoter in Berlin who is one of the three founders of Clean Scene. “This year while touring I saw a lot of festivals changing the way they’re doing things when it comes to plastic and encouraging artists to take trains to the festival.”Vision: 2025, a nonprofit in Bristol, England, has gotten more than 40 festivals in Britain to pledge to cut their emissions in half and double their recycling rates by 2025. Daybreaker, which organizes sober dance parties worldwide, hosts a series of morning raves where single-use plastics are prohibited and public transportation is encouraged.Some festival organizers say the changes need to be more systemic. Music festivals are “completely dependent on cheap flights and therefore the consumption of fossil fuels,” said Eilidh McLaughlin, 35, a founder of Clean Scene. “Any effort to advance sustainability is essentially greenwashing unless you are working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably.”The festival took place in Nashville in August.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThe lights and sounds will be offset by the planting of trees.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesIn 2020, DGTL, an organization in Amsterdam that produces electronic music festivals, pledged to be climate neutral. “We are trying to create a new festival landscape where sustainability will be the norm,” said Mitchell van Dooijeweerd, 31, the sustainability manager for DGTL. “It’s become a business model, because we are experts in this and everybody wants to change.”For this year’s Deep Tropics, the organizers teamed with Green Disco, a company in New York that helps events become environmentally friendlier. During the festival, its founders Jonah Geschwind, 22, and Jacob Chandler, 21, stood at the entrance and sold $20 “eco-bands”: green wristbands that funded the planting of trees and other environmental causes.“If you make sustainability easy and as cool as possible, people are going to naturally adopt it,” said Mr. Chandler, who said they sold about 500 bracelets, which he estimates will offset 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide.A group called Green Disco sold “eco-bands” that will offset carbon emissions. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesBigger festivals are also making efforts: Coachella has increased vegan food options, urged its attendees to car pool and pledged to slash emissions; Burning Man announced a 10-year sustainability road map in 2019.And some music acts are trying, too. Coldplay has pledged that its current tour will create half as much greenhouse gas emissions as its previous one. The band is also touring with a kinetic dance floor that uses human movement to create electricity. The floor was a previous attraction at Club Watt, a dance club in Rotterdam that’s now closed.Still, real-world practicalities sometimes get in the way. At this year’s Burning Man there were 12-hour traffic jams, leaving ravers stuck in hot, idling cars while Nevada temperatures crept above 100 degrees. And at Deep Tropics, some vendors used plastic packaging despite signing pledges.There were no trash cans at the festival (though plenty of recycling and compost bins).Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThat doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made, said Heather White, 49, an environmental scientist in Bozeman, Mont., and founder of the nonprofit One Green Thing.“From a 30,000-foot level, does all this matter?” she said. “It absolutely matters. These electronic music festivals are drivers of culture change. We have to have these living laboratories, where people can see zero waste at a concert, because without culture change, big policy solutions are not going to work.” More

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      Can a Start-Up Help the Film and TV Industry Reduce Their Carbon Footprint?

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      The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. A Spanish director has set up a company to try to cut that number substantially.This article is part of Upstart, a series on young companies harnessing new science and technology.The Goya Awards — Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, held this year in February in Valencia — are a glamorous, televised affair. At the event, the actors Javier Bardem and Cate Blanchett each collected trophies.Behind the scenes, the organizers were attempting something decidedly less glamorous: cutting the ceremony’s carbon emissions.They did so with help from Creast, an entertainment-industry sustainability company founded in late 2019 by Eduardo Vieitez, a Spanish film and advertising director. Creast, which advised the awards in the run-up to the ceremony, prevented the release of 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of 20 car trips around the world and enough to fill 50 Olympic-sized pools — into the atmosphere, according to a news release from the organizers, the Academia de Cine de España, the Spanish film academy.By having staff members take trains instead of flights and stay in hotels close to the ceremony venue, the Goyas’ organizers said they cut transport-related emissions by 55 percent. And by knocking beef off all menus — for staff and attendees — and serving vegetables, chicken and fish instead, they reduced catering emissions by 40 percent.Mr. Vieitez, who has been in the film business for two decades, working with brands like Sony, Samsung and BMW, established the company and its app during the pandemic. “I have worked in more than 20 countries, and it always struck me how unsustainable our processes were,” he said.He started Creast with 300,000 euros (about $305,000) in seed funding from himself, his relatives and friends. The start-up attracted 100 clients in its first year, he said, including Telefónica, IBM, Nestlé and Amazon Prime Video. It now has a staff of around 30 people, including environmental technicians based in Spain, and software developers based in India, he said.When working to advise award shows or film and TV productions, Creast teams look over scripts, budgets and production designs before shooting starts and assesses the project’s carbon footprint based on information on the number of locations; the transportation and accommodation needs, depending on whether crews are local or flown in; the energy requirements for filming and post-production; and materials used for props, costumes, and on-screen vehicles.Once a production gets under way, Creast team members are physically present to carry out checks on site, including measuring lighting and sound pollution and reviewing the sustainability certificates of vehicles and accommodations for cast and crew.Creast charges 0.1 percent of the production budget as a fee, Mr. Vieitez said. Creast keeps their fee low because rather than gather detailed and granular data for each new production, the company uses data from past productions (compiled using machine learning and artificial intelligence) to partially extrapolate the environmental footprint of comparable film shoots or events.Earlier this year, the San Sebastián Film Festival in the Basque region of Spain, which runs from Sept. 16 to 24, invited Creast to help cut its emissions, said Amaia Serrulla, who leads the festival’s sustainability efforts.Creast teams have already made recommendations, Ms. Serrulla said, including that the festival work with local suppliers, use recyclable and reusable packaging and implement top-down LED lighting (rather than bottom-up, which is not as sustainable). They also advised cutting back on paper, so the festival is printing half as many festival guides as usual — and charging for them.The festival, supported by a region that prides itself on its cuisine, did balk at one piece of the Creast teams’ advice: “They recommended not using meat,” Ms. Serulla said. “We have vegan options and vegetarian options, but we are not going to take meat out of the menu for now.”The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the Producers Guild of America, a trade organization representing American producers of television, film and new media. That’s more than the aerospace, clothing, hotel or semiconductor industries, the Guild said.“Climate change is the most pressing global issue facing us today,” said a March 2021 report by the Sustainable Production Alliance, a consortium established in 2010 that includes some of the world’s biggest film, television and streaming companies. The report added that a major production from a studio had an average carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons, or 33 metric tons per day of shooting. Roughly half of that was from fuel consumption generated by air travel and utilities.The British industry has similar issues. A report released in 2020 by the British Film Institute and other organizations found that on average, a major studio production generated 2,840 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 11 one-way trips to the moon. Air travel alone produced as many emissions as 150 one-way flights from London to New York, or 3.4 million car miles, according to the report.Creast joins an existing effort to gauge the industry’s carbon emissions, which includes guides and tools like online calculators that allow users to measure their industry footprint themselves.One widely known tool is the Green Production Guide, established in 2010 by the Producers Guild of America and the Sustainable Production Alliance to help cut the entertainment industry’s emissions. Its founders include industry giants such as Amazon Studios, Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The site offers a calculator with which a production’s footprint can be measured and an international database of sustainable goods and service providers working in the film and TV production industry.In Britain, Wearealbert.org, a consortium of British television industry participants set up in 2011, has a carbon calculator that has been used by more than 1,300 production companies for more than 7,500 productions, according to its website. The calculator adds up the environmental cost of transportation and accommodation, production spaces (offices, studios and sound stages), time spent in the editing suite and the use and disposal of materials used (paint, for example).Most film productions are working with tight budgets, “so the simpler a tool for greening production, the more likely it is to be used,” Sean Cubitt, a professor of screen studies at the University of Melbourne, wrote in an email. He said, though, that he was not familiar with Creast.A challenge, he explained, is that movies and television shows are increasingly doing preproduction, production and postproduction in several places.“Bigger productions will have their virtual sets built in one country, their effects designed in another, and their editing done in a third,” Mr. Cubitt said. “That used to be true only of mega-productions like the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, but the supply chain model is now pretty ubiquitous.”As a result, the environmental costs are generated in multiple locations, making sustainability a much more complicated objective to achieve for companies such as Creast.The Creast app, which calculates total emissions of a production by combining line items like transportation, fuel use and food consumption. Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesMore important, Mr. Cubitt said, the industry remains a huge polluter because of the media servers used by streaming services, which he said were “already responsible for about as much carbon emission as the airline industry before the pandemic.”In other words, production companies that are “flying crews to remote locations and trashing them” aren’t “the really big culprit,” he said.“Let’s share the blame here,” he wrote. More