Top 5 Music Festivals that are Going Green
If you are like me, you’re going to hit as many music festivals this summer as your wallet can handle.
We’ll be joined by hundreds of thousands of people heading out to enjoy great band performances. Of course, that also means hundreds of thousands of people eating packaged food and drinking bottled water (and other substances) and all the waste that entails. And let’s not forget the tons of fossil fuels burned just getting there.
Fortunately, many festival programmers and organizers have been working behind the scenes for years to try to mitigate some of the environmental impact of these annual throngs of music-lovers. They all adhere to the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ principles at the heart of greening their festivals, but that is just the beginning. Most are upping the ante on green initiatives.
Here I highlight just five of this summer’s festivals and their creative and inspiring eco-initiatives:
1. Bumbershoot, Seattle
Bumbershoot is a leader in green festivals. To begin with, organizers have creatively applied the re-use principle by turning their old signage into new Bumbershoot bags. A small local business called Alchemy Goods turns old rubber and vinyl into bags. 
All this is after the festival signs have already been used multiple times. First they print most of their new signage locally on 100% recyclable material using 100% VOC and solvent-free inks. Then they re-use a large percentage of the previous year’s signs for the current year’s promotion.
