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Can music festivals actually go green?
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Workers pick up trash on the grounds during the first week of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, April 14, 2023. (AFP/Valerie Macon)
C
oachella 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.
