Gas-guzzling trucks carrying gear from city to city. Food waste emitting potent methane. Plastic utensils, plastic bags for merch (where is that sweatshirt coming from?), plastic light-up bracelets, plastic water bottles. Fans traveling tens to hundreds of miles to the arena. Single-use outfits from Shein and Amazon. These are just a few of the reasons why globe-trotting tours are anything but sustainable endeavors.
But there’s a groundswell of artists — notably Billie Eilish and Coldplay — changing how concerts are staged from the bottom up. These eco-minded musicians are following in the lighter-carbon footsteps of the Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson, who led the charge in the 2010s with their green riders and sustainability initiatives.
Eilish has partnered with the music industry-focused nonprofit Reverb to make her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour as sustainable as possible, like she did with her “Happier Than Ever” trek. This translates to plant-based food options, allowing reusable water bottles, a “no idling” policy for trucks, enhanced recycling measures, donating excess catered food, hotel toiletries and camping gear left behind by fans and more.
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At each stop of Eilish’s tour, there’s also an “Eco-Action Village” connecting fans with local organizations. In Los Angeles, fans were introduced to Eilish’s mom’s Support+Feed, which works to mitigate climate change by making plant-based food accessible, and Project Ropa, which aims to reduce waste by providing clothing and hygiene essentials to those in need. The Kia Forum was strewn with scannable codes to learn more about the tour’s impact, and the arena provided an unheard-of amount of vegan options, including beloved Angeleno vendors Donut Friend and Monty’s Good Burger.
Courtesy Reverb
Lara Seaver, Reverb’s director of touring and projects, says many venues just need that extra push to do away with COVID policies that lead to excess plastic usage, for example. “A lot of venues say, ‘I’ve been meaning to do this, I’ve been wanting to do this. I’ve been meeting resistance from this party or that party, but the fact that this tour is asking for it, it allows me to make this happen.’”
The reality, however, is that the largest emissions from tours come from sectors far beyond the artist’s control, like heating the facility, organic waste and, of course, the transportation methods everyone uses to get to the venues.
“The majority of emissions within live music come from audience travel — burning fossil fuels to get to and from concerts,” says Matt Brennan, a professor of popular music at the University of Glasgow.
While Eilish encourages fans to take public transit, in a city like L.A., that isn’t always feasible. Still, Reverb provided complimentary park-and-ride buses at multiple locations during the L.A. run of the stateside tour, which ended Dec. 21.
“We don’t ever put the blame on an individual concertgoer for any of the impact,” Seaver says, adding that Reverb tries to steer clear of fear-mongering methods to persuade already climate-anxious fans. “It’s the systems that are in place, and we just hope that we can get together and use the power of the collective audience to make changes.”
As Eilish’s North American tour dates end, Coldplay is embarking on the next leg of its “Music of the Spheres” tour — the highest grossing rock tour ever — on Jan. 9. The band prominently displays a “Sustainability” tab on its website that details Coldplay’s plans to cut its carbon emissions by 50% compared with its 2016-17 tour. Achieving that goal means measures like commercial flights when possible, sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), compostable LED wristbands and even kinetic floors that convert fans’ dancing into energy. Coldplay additionally pledges to plant one new tree for every ticket sold.
The band also urges concertgoers to use low-carbon travel methods. Coldplay has seen a 49% reduction in emissions compared to its previous tour (per an app and post-show surveys), says Luke Howell of environmental consulting firm Hope Solutions, which works closely with the band. “In 2024, we saw 45% of fans surveyed arriving to shows on foot, by bike or using the subway/ underground, bus or train.”
This coming summer, Coldplay has a 10-night stint at London’s Wembley Stadium, which “will be 100% powered by renewable energy — a world first for a show of that size!” Howell says.
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A hopeful sign for the cause, the music industry seems incredibly open to enacting climate protocol, MIT Climate Machine co-founders John Fernandez and Norhan Bayomi emphasize. The two are leaders at the school’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, which has partnered with Warner Music Group, Coldplay and Live Nation to find precise emissions numbers from live music and provide industry-wide recommendations to make concerts greener.
“All the stakeholders that we spoke with from the music industry, everyone is super keen on how they can improve their operation. The lack of knowledge and understanding of what needs to be done is the only major barrier right now, but the interest and the passion to improve sustainability practices in the music industry exists,” Bayomi says.
While ticket prices remain a hot-button issue, Fernandez is optimistic that, with the touring recommendations he is creating, the fans won’t have to pay the cost. “The touring guide…makes the case that the sustainability options should really only track alongside maintaining your audience, or even growing your audience. And to do that, there are some things that one can do that may not increase costs, and actually may even decrease costs,” he says.
For now, some sustainability measures such as plant-based food options can be more expensive. “The leading edge is sometimes going to incur a premium, because people haven’t done things that way. But then after that, the leading edge becomes standard, and then prices will stabilize,” Fernandez says. Seaver says that, while she’s sometimes seen a slight sustainability cost, it’s been negligible (and she adds that the vegan entrées at Eilish’s shows cost the same as non-plant-based meals). For Coldplay’s part, Howell says, “Some things inevitably do cost more, but the band has made the decision not to pass those costs onto fans and keep tickets accessible.”
Still, are these measures actually helping the environment or just letting us all sleep a little better at night?
In truth, even with every green protocol in place and followed to a tee, getting a tour to zero carbon emissions isn’t possible in today’s world. The only solution would be to stop touring entirely. Indeed, climate-forward trip-hop group Massive Attack recently made headlines by revealing it turned down Coachella due to environmental concerns.
“There’s a lot of research to suggest that we need to radically and quickly redesign the entire global economy in order to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, but that’s a very difficult and decades-long project, and it’s not fair to say that someone like Billie should be responsible for all of that,” Brennan says. “That would be silly, and from my perspective, I think that the best that we can hope for is to increase understanding and engagement on this issue. One of the most beautiful aspects of being a human being is to express oneself or participate in music. It should be something that is retained as we try to decarbonize.”
Billie Eilish wears the Music Declares Emergency slogan “No Music on a Dead Planet” at the 2019 American Music Awards.
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Fernandez, who specializes in sustainable urban systems, says people may be surprised to learn through his upcoming research that touring contributes relatively little to climate change. “The music industry is a very small component of overall carbon emissions,” Fernandez says. “But it has a very, very large footprint in terms of climate communications and engagement.”
Brennan agrees that globally popular artists like Eilish, Coldplay and Massive Attack have a powerful platform from which to relay the urgency of the climate crisis. “The thing that makes music different from the concrete industry, for example, is not just that it has a smaller footprint, but that it has a disproportionate communicating and influencing power,” he says. “[Eilish] has an extremely loyal fan base, which is, in a way, a double-edged sword. Those fans will want to travel to go see her. They will want to buy whatever she sells. But they will also, I think, want to listen to whatever she says.”