Outside Lands: Green Music Festival Rocks the City by the Bay
by Alex Smith, San Francisco, California on 08.25.08
This past weekend, around 150,000 happy people danced and swayed to sixty four bands ranging in style from rap to indie rock in the first ever Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco. Outside Lands not only blessed the hallowed stomping ground of the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin with Golden Gate Park’s first night concert in history (environmentally conscious Radiohead did the honors), it also celebrated San Francisco’s eco-loving energy in a serious way.
Festivals are not always the most green friendly places. Any compulsive recycler would go crazy at most of them. Music lovers rush off to catch the shows they love, often leaving behind a sea of cups across the lawn (bad news even if they’re these reusable festival cups). Then there’s the carbon footprint of all the people getting to the event. And as one artist said in a press conference at the festival, “it’s crazy how much [musicians] pollute… we travel all the time.”
More on how the organizers kept the festival clean after the jump...
The bike valet was ultra efficient.
Outside Lands did an amazing job working to clean up the festival scene, starting the moment concert goers bought their tickets. At the end of the purchase they could donate to help offset the event’s carbon footprint. This money then went to reforestation and manure management projects. Bike riders felt swanky about their eco-friendly transportation choice, dropping their bikes off at the festival’s ultra efficient bike valet. Once in the concert space, bins labeled “compost,” “recycling” and “landfill” abounded and it was clear there was more space made for the first two. All of the food was served on compostable plates with eco-friendly utensils that stayed out of the trash.
Festival-goers had easy-to-use bins for recycling, composting and landfill.
The green vibe wove way beyond the usual concert basics. If festival goers’ cell phone batteries were dead from too many calls searching for friends, they could hop by the Ecolands space to charge them with solar and wind power. Also in Ecolands was a farmer’s market featuring locally grown produce, a rockin’ solar powered stage and even composting demos. If people did find any of those cups decorating the beautiful park, they could bring them to the TRASHed Recycling store, co-hosted by Planet Green, to exchange them for cool new gear. Oh and did I mention any generators at the event were running on 20% biodiesel?
Even many of the musicians featured at Outside Lands were green. Wilco recently launched a tool to get their fans carpooling to their shows. Jack Johnson loves the Earth and goes green by driving on biodiesel, greening his tour and saving the ocean. Ben Harper is all about green education. And of course, Thom Yorke, who with Radiohead hypnotized a monstrous audience with their Friday night sounds, takes on the political side of going green.
As Les Claypool said in a press conference Saturday, San Francisco “is one of the places that helps spawn something different [than the status quo].” Let’s hope the city’s Outside Lands does just this, inspiring a green change in historically eco-unfriendly festivals everywhere.
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very nice to see a post about this event.
Actually, as someone living in San Francisco, I can verify that everybody I know who went (and news stories about Outside Lands verified this) said that it was a dirty, poorly run event, and should not be tried again next year. A good idea, but poorly executed.
It would have been nice to have known about this in time to get tickets and go to it. Bummer. I would also like to know when the next one is.
It was a great festival and there was a huge effort to green the event. However, the layout and circulation planning could have been executed better. I would say learn from the mistakes definitely try again next year!
Outside Lands was a perfect example of over-hyped greenwashing. It was heavily marketed as a "green" festival, but in execution only touched on sustainability. The bike valet was not provided by the festival, but by the SF Bicycle Coalition.