Photograph by Micaela McLucas / Trunk Archive
Each year, thousands of festival-goers gather in the Danish sunshine for Roskilde Festival. What started in 1971 as the scrappy, bohemian brainchild of high school students Mogens Sandfær and Jesper Switzer Møller, with the help of music promoter Carl Fischer, is now a nonprofit behemoth and the largest music festival in all of Scandinavia, attracting over 100,000 attendees each year.
Throughout the festival’s growth, values of community and circularity have remained at the core of Roskilde’s operations—including a razor sharp focus on sustainability. “I think festivals are important because we can actually do things differently for a short while at our campsite,” said Sanne Stephansen, Roskilde Festival’s head of sustainability. “We can offer a window into the future, so we always try to [stick to] the theme of utopia.”
Roskilde’s commitment to climate-forward experimentation manifests itself most clearly in the innovative Circular Lab, a kind of pop-up trade show offering environmentally focused creators the chance to trial nascent designs on a willing audience. Last year’s startups ran the gamut from furniture made of mycelium composites to seaweed-based food packaging, offering a broad spectrum of ideas to help combat the climate crisis. The Circular Lab is a novel and unconventional idea, but it also offers intriguing insight into how festivals can foster steps toward a greener future which live on after the festival site is broken down and loaded out.
But Roskilde is a bit of an anomaly. The significant carbon footprint of music festivals has been well-documented, from emissions caused by mass travel to energy-intensive generators powering festival stages. Post-festival campsites are typically strewn with broken-down tents and trampled plastic, the majority of which won’t be recycled: A single major festival can produce approximately 875,000 discarded plastic cups and 2 million plastic bottles, while other experts estimate that around 250,000 tents are left behind on campsites across the United Kingdom every year.
These temporary pop-up cities have over the years become a microcosm of environmental issues plaguing the live music industry more broadly; but when it comes to moving toward a greener way of operating, even the most ardent climate campaigners have been impressed by recent progress.
A tipping point came in 2019, when Music Declares Emergency was launched in the U.K. to harness the industry’s potential to push for positive change. CEO Lewis Jamieson tells Atmos that things have improved immensely since then, citing key initiatives like the establishment of Live Nation’s Green Nation, an international sustainability charter which enforces best environmental practice rules, and the Music Climate Pact, an industry-wide, global pact to reduce carbon emissions, signed by the likes of Sony and Universal. “The music industry has realized two things,” he explained. “The first is that their audience actually wants to see this action. People don’t want to go to events and feel like they’re contributing to the imminent, catastrophic death of all life on Earth; it’s not a nice feeling! The second is that [sustainability] is profitable. We’re open and realistic about this: no profit equals no music industry.”
“I think festivals are important because we can actually do things differently for a short while at our campsite. We can offer a window into the future, so we always try to [stick to] the theme of utopia.”
Sanne Stephansen
head of sustainability, Roskilde Festival
Music Declares Emergency specializes in bold, no-bullshit slogans, like their No Music on a Dead Planet campaign. “It’s the thing we put out there to try and get people engaged,” Jamieson said. “And we reckon it’s been seen by about half a billion people worldwide. That’s not because we’re superior communicators—although I would say we are very good at it—but it’s because we’ve been supported by people like WILLOW [Smith], Billie Eilish, and the 1975.” The likes of Morrisey and Massive Attack have long pushed for change, and today’s new wave of stars are taking up the mantle as key climate messengers. Not only can they get through to fans, they can also make huge changes backstage through initiatives like “green riders,” documents that specify requests to make a performance or tour more sustainable by enforcing plant-based catering, single-use plastic bans, and partnerships with environmental NGOs.
Festivals are increasingly taking up the challenge of working more sustainably, too. Roskilde allows festival-goers to rent their camping gear for a refundable deposit, and it’s a scheme that’s working. In 2024, there was an almost 25% uptick in the number of campers renting their gear compared to 2023. This year will see an increased focus on waste-sorting at campsites across Roskilde, and there’s an ongoing effort to turn non-recyclable materials into festival merchandise. The overall aim is to eradicate single-use plastics, which involves moving toward reusable cups and encouraging festival-goers to bring their own cutlery. In Stephansen’s eyes, the question is always: “How can we get participants to engage in the change?”
Another international player taking major steps forward is Primavera Sound. Just a week before this year’s Barcelona festival kicks off, the Head of Press and PR Marta Pallerès uses the camera on her phone during our call to give me a panoramic view of the festival site’s construction. “All of the site materials—the tarpaulins, signage, backstage furniture, even the AstroTurf that you see over there—are reused every single year,” she said. “It’s extra work because you have to store and clean the materials, but it extends their lifespan, so it’s really what we felt that we had to do.”
On top of this, Primavera partners with sustainability nonprofits like A Greener Future, as well as renewable energy partners like Plenitude, a collaboration which means that seven of this year’s nine stages will be powered by clean energy. Another mitigating factor is that Primavera is an urban festival, with no available campsite. This means no tent waste, but it also allows festival organizers to collaborate with local transport authorities to ensure all-night service on festival days, incentivizing attendees to leave their cars behind.
Finding green solutions is always a process of trial and error, but some festivals have built pioneering blueprints. The U.K.’s Shambala Festivalbecame the first to go meat- and fish-free back in 2016. But by 2024, 20% of assessed music festivals in 2024 were either fully vegetarian or vegan, more than double the 8% reported the year before. Shambala is still ahead of the curve. This year, it will become the first U.K. festival whose gas consumption will be 100% biogas. Meanwhile, Music Declares Emergency last year teamed up with four U.K. festivals—Shambala, Boomtown, FORWARDS and Love Saves The Day—sourcing all of their sustainability details and using them to create a green festival-goer guide. “It was our way of saying, This is what these festivals are doing, and this is how you can help them,” says Jamieson. “It was just a way to try and encourage people to be part of the process.”
Initiatives like these are crucial, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. Massive Attack turned down an invitation to perform at this year’s Coachella, citing the festival’s environmental impact, and emissions caused by travel are proving tricky to reduce across the board. These issues go beyond the remit of festival organizers; for example, traveling internationally by train often requires lengthy, convoluted journeys that pale in comparison to the ease of low-cost flights. It’s also not uncommon for tents to be made of toxic, flame-retardant material, a fact Stephansen learned when researching whether they could be recycled into wearable merch.
“If you give people targets that are achievable, and if you give them a sense of purpose and agency, you start to see progress, and that’s what we’ve seen the music industry do so well over the last five years.”
Lewis Jamieson
CEO, Music Declares Emergency
But when it comes to existing sustainability initiatives, audience participation is key. Reusable cup schemes, camping equipment rentals, and the incentivization of public transport are all well and good, but they rely on people actually using them. For Primavera, a festival that very much wears its values on its sleeve, this hasn’t been too much of a problem; based on feedback surveys, Pallarès estimates that 70% of attendees follow the waste-sorting and recycling protocols, but she stresses that this relies on effective communication with the audience.
Jamieson echoes the sentiment that attendees are doing their part. “If you dig under the bonnet with reports that are coming out, last year’s Kendal Calling report showed almost no tent waste, a huge amount of waste reduction, and a huge uptick in recycling,” he said. Facilities like compostable toilets are getting better because they’re more common, meaning there’s now a “wider system to plug into.” This, in turn, provides a blueprint for other festivals to follow.
These nitty-gritty details are important, but a key fact is that the unique combination of music, community, and near-total isolation from the outside world make festivals powerful breeding grounds for hope. “For us, the climate emergency boils down to a very simple thing,” said Jamieson. “If we don’t change things, we risk losing everything. People don’t want or need to be in the weeds of a conversation to be supportive of it, and there’s this feeling that we can collectively do something about this.”
Proof is mounting that attendees can be incentivized to sort their waste, recycle their cups, and rent their tents, but creative industries can also cut through the noise and engage people in the climate crisis. Festivals are about music, but their programs are wide-ranging; you’ll often find everything from morning yoga to dedicated tents with political panels and creative workshops. Increasingly, conversations around climate action, conservation, and environmental responsibility are making their way into these spaces, shaping not just the talks but the culture of the festivals themselves.
This sense of community is key to the climate movement, and Roskilde in particular is informed by its green partnerships, as well as volunteer input. “We can’t make change alone,” explained Stephansen. “We need each other. Not only is the festival a kind of testing ground, we can also facilitate a network for partners to meet each other, and explore opportunities. I think, if someone can leave the festival feeling inspired by something one of the youth organisations said in a workshop, or something they heard on a stage that can inspire positive change, it’s the biggest impact we can have.”
Statements like these cut to the core of what festivals can actually do: They’re a temporary escape from daily life, but they’re also key sites of knowledge exchange, community-building, and, of course, good old-fashioned joy.
“If you look throughout history, you see loads of examples of these doomsday cults having massive parties on the day they think the world is going to end,” said Jamieson. “We’re not even close to that with a climate emergency—we know it’s a bad situation that’s getting worse, but we’re a hell of a long way from the apocalypse.” In his eyes, the solution is simple: “If you give people targets that are achievable, and if you give them a sense of purpose and agency, you start to see progress, and that’s what we’ve seen the music industry do so well over the last five years,” he added.
“They’ve looked at the operations, and they’ve said: What can we fix? By taking things one at a time, we’re really starting to fix things.”
Biome
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