If you’ve ever been to a festival, or even a concert, you have an idea how much waste these events can generate.

The top 100 tours in 2015 sold an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles (the equivalent of 48,000 barrels of oil) while 130 million paper goods (about 160,000 trees) were used,” Huffington Post reports.

“[And] 80 to 90 percent of concerts’ carbon emissions come from fans driving en masse to get there.”

Well, musician Jack Johnson has had enough of all the waste; and he is working to make his shows as sustainable as possible. So, before the singer-songwriter agrees to play a show at a venue, he now has to be assured that all his “environmental demands” are met in his concert riders.

Johnson’s riders request that recycling not be thrown away with trash and that energy-efficient lightbulbs be installed throughout a venue before he takes the stage. He also asks “the venue to purchase carbon dioxide offsets to cover all the energy used during the show,” Huffington Post reports.

“You hear all these horror stories of people’s riders requesting one color of M&Ms or super fancy champagne,” Johnson says. “We just figured, all right, let’s be demanding with these, because we know they’re not going to switch back to those energy-draining bulbs once the show is over.”

In 2008, before Johnson overhauled his touring habits, he almost decided to never go on the road again. “I didn’t know if I needed to keep touring, especially when I considered the environmental impact of what I was doing,” he says.

So, Johnson and his wife decided he’d continue to tour if they could turn his tours into fundraisers and make the shows as sustainable as possible. “For the next five years, they used environmentally focused riders to force venues into greening up their spaces with reusable beer pints, water refill stations and energy-saving equipment,” the Post adds. “They traveled on tour buses and used generators that were powered by biodiesel fuel. He insisted on using caterers who use locally sourced, organic foods and encouraged fans to take alternative transportation to the shows by setting up bike valets or promoting mobile carpool apps.”

After all his work, Johnson managed to make his tours incredibly green, and also influenced a few venues to change their un-sustainable ways.

“The thing we keep hearing from venues, which we think is cool, is that they realize [the changes they made] were more cost-effective,” Johnson says. “Or, they just realize they had great feedback from the patrons and they get so much good press that they start doing everything they can [to green up the venue].”

So, how much of an impact is Johnson making with these changes? Quite a big one.

During Johnson’s last tour, he was able to:

• Offset 2.3 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
• Divert 489 pounds of waste from landfills.
• Prevent 18,392 single-use plastic bottles from being used.

Now, that’s something to sing about.

Related on EcoSalon

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The Coral Restoration Foundation Does Gorgeous, Ocean-Saving Work [Video]

Image of Jack Johnson via Shutterstock, Daniel DeSlover

The post Here’s Why Jack Johnson’s Concert Riders Matter, Even if You’re Not a Fan appeared first on EcoSalon.

Party time, excellent.

It’s the season for music festivals, that special time of the year when thousands of revelers crowd into grassy outdoor venues each weekend for multi-day, multi-act celebrations of rhythm, art, and food. Whether you fancy hard rock, house music, or the horn-heavy beats of New Orleans jazz, there’s a fête for you. And though some festivals have fallen victim to high prices and over-commercialization, there are still a fair amount of smaller concerts that offer the same great vibes, without the $11 cans of Coors Light. Take your pick from our photo collection of music festivals from around the world and hopefully get ready to attend one for yourself!

(above) Free Press Summer Fest, Houston, Texas, USA

Summer Sonic, Chiba, Japan

Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona, Spain

Roskilde Festival, Roskilde, Denmark

Tomorrowland, Boom, Belgium

Bonnaroo, Manchester, Tennessee, USA

All Tomorrow’s Parties, Somerset, England

Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, USA

Splendour in the Grass, New South Wales, Australia

Festival Rock Feminino, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Vive Latino, Mexico City, Mexico

Exit Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia

Oxegen, Kildare County, Ireland

T in the Park, Kinross, Scotland

All Tomorrow’s Parties, Monticello, New York, USA

Stagecoach Festival, Indio, California, USA

Summerfest, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

InMusic Festival, Zagreb, Croatia

Sasquatch Music Festival, Quincy, Washington, USA

Ultra Music Festival, Miami, Florida

All Tomorrow’s Parties, London, England

NOLA Jazz Fest, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Sziget Festival, Budapest, Hungary

Pukkelpop, Hasselt, Belgium

Glastonbury, Pilton, England

Rock al Parque, Bogota, Colombia

Outside Lands, San Francisco, California, USA

Rock Werchter, Werchter, Belgium

Rock in Rio, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Coachella, Indio, California, USA

SEE ALSO:

25 Images of Female Adrenaline Seekers

30 Gorgeous Photos of Spring

40 Photos from Flea Markets Around the World

View more photo collections here. 

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When love for live music crosses the ticket line to addiction.

Skipped out on rent to blow extra cash at Coachella? Scheduled a pregnancy around a Phish concert? How about letting mom’s birthday cake candles melt just to spend an extra hour with Dave?

Find me a harmless hobby or a gentle habit and I’ll show you someone who’s developed a full-blown addiction. We humans are good at getting hooked, but why? Addiction has its roots in a neurotransmitter called dopamine. This chemical plays an integral role in the pleasure we derive from sex, food and yes, rock ‘n roll. The first time you hear a song you like, one or more elements in the music causes an increase in the level of dopamine in your brain. This might lead you to download the tune and listen to it over and over again for days (admit it, you’ve done this). But after hearing it many times, the pleasure subsides because you no longer have the cues to make the dopamine to kick in as powerfully. In other words, it gets old.

This is why live music takes on greater importance for music lovers. Even the most manufactured pop stars perform their songs a little bit differently with each gig, and musicians who are known for improvisation manage to keep their fans not only interested but coming to shows repeatedly.

The ‘high’ occurs not only when you feel, taste or hear something that you thoroughly enjoy but also with its anticipation. With bands like Phish, Dave Matthews and of course, the Dead, the set list always changes and predicting which songs are going to be performed is part of the ride. As one song ends the thrilling deduction process begins again for the next song. If you’re right and it’s a song that you really love, dopamine, that wonder drug, kicks right back in again.

Concerts have a communal spirit that can help ‘feed’ the addiction. I remember watching the Dead and feeling a sense of connection with the strangers around me as we danced to “Sugar Magnolia.” (And it’s not just a substance-induced euphoria.)

Live music can provide a transcendental and very personal experience. Phish follower, Jon Bates, says, “It’s like a religion for me. It really gets deep inside you.”

Dopamine’s role in our affinity for music can border on the extreme. The general medical consensus is that as long as it does not negatively impact your life, being obsessed with seeing live music is a harmless habit. Besides, is planning a pregnancy around a tour all that different from trying to conceive in February so you end up with a little Scorpio?

Image: Carlo Cravero

The post I Did It All for the Dopamine appeared first on EcoSalon.

You know it’s true. You might forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on, but you would never, ever leave your smartphone at home. This fact could work in your favor next time you head out to a concert or event and leave behind everything you need for the evening – except your tickets, because they’ll be on, yep, your smartphone! (Oh, and how much do you hate Ticketmaster? More on that later”¦)

Twicketer is a new paperless ticketing service (can you say save like a billion trees?) that uses what TriplePundit is calling “a scam proof system” for on-phone ticket sales and downloading. The process is simple enough: Event promoters create an account on Twicketer, set up an event and are given a URL that can be used in promotions anywhere online: via email, websites, Facebook, Twitter, wherever. (Twicketer refers to its service as “social ticketing,” by the way.)

To get your paperless ticket, you just click on the URL and you’re taken to a website that accepts PayPal or credit cards in exchange for a for-your-use-only link where you’ll “accept” your ticket to your phone. (You can buy multiples if you like, and distribute them to your friends’ phones, as well.) Security at the event checks your phone “like an ID card.” With a couple of taps you verify your ticket with the system’s servers and voila, the velvet rope’s undone. The service can also be used for coupons and vouchers.

The technology was developed by Twicketer’s parent company, Screen Ticket, which has developed something called “On Device Verification,” a patent-pending feature that makes it possible to redeem coupons and tickets without the use of scanners or any other hardware. This is great news for folks putting on events (or redeeming coupons) as everything’s done directly on your web-enabled phone, which also provides real-time statistics about conversion rates, usage and other info that marketers get all excited about. The technology also boasts a seven-ways-from-Sunday, you-so-can’t-f-with-it security system.

Twicketer is now in beta, but is looking like a damn good idea. The service can already deliver mobile tickets to more than 200 countries through hundreds of mobile carriers and is prefect for events both big and small. And here’s a big kicker: the service charge is only 99 cents a ticket! Setting aside for a moment the fact that we all love using our smartphones for doing, well, pretty much everything, consider the service charges and general hassles Ticketmaster, et al., have been killing you with for, oh, how many years now? Wouldn’t it be nice to stick it to the Ticketmaster man? By the way, a quick Google of “Why does Ticketmaster suck so bad?” is some great fun. (Oops! Does the link I provided for Ticketmaster just now take you to ticketmastersucks.org? Did I do that?!)

Image: micahtaylor

The post Showtime for Smartphones: Calling It in with Paperless Ticketing appeared first on EcoSalon.

Image: Stern Grove

We Shall Overcome sung in Farsi? Whatever works!

Adding a verse of the civil rights anthem in Persian roused the throng of Iranian concert goers joining some 10,000 fans blanketing San Francisco’s Stern Grove to hear folk legend, Joan Baez, speak to them. Her appearance was the highlight of the 2009 summer series of free performances at the popular outdoor venue.

The folk singer’s legendary soprano voice, showing only the slightest hint of rust at age 68, is now reaching Iranian Americans, like Susan Javaheri (below), who spread out blankets early in the morning to save seats for dozens of her friends. They are moved and encouraged by the singer’s  solidarity with citizens protesting the recent elections in their homeland and murder of Neda Soltan, the beautiful artist shot to death by a sniper during the unrest.

“Joan Baez wrote a song about us, about our plight, and she’s going to sing it,” she told me. “We have a green scroll we are having signed which we are going to wave today during the concert, and take with us to hang at the Eiffel Tower.

The scroll is part of a worldwide project of sewing many squares together to form the world’s longest petition scroll. It reads, “Ahmadinejad is not Iran’s President” and the goals, articulated at the scroll website, include sending the final banner to the United Nations and for foreign powers not to recognize him as president.

As Baez made her dedication to the Iranian cause, audience members held up their banner and moved towards the stage, while others were busy handing out flyers advertising upcoming mega rallies, including one at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza July 25th.

Meantime, the “barefoot Madonna” reached baby boomers with classics, such as Forever Young (which she dedicated to her 96-year-old mother who was in the crowd), Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice and the old folk tune, Silver Dagger.

“In the dagger song, nobody dies, believe it or not,” joked the singer. “I usually have a rule of only singing songs in which somebody dies.”

A tie-dyed Andy Rod (above) understands the death part of the protest songs. “My brother was a Vietnam vet who died of Agent Orange and my dad fought in the Japanese war,” he told me. “I listened to her music growing up and the stuff she says really touches my heart.”

She touches my heart as well, reminding me of the days when I played guitar and sang her songs with my own brother who was killed in 1974. The first album my dad ever gave me was a Baez anthology, along with an accompanying book of the guitar music of folk legends (Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell).

You could say Baez is one of the few surviving guitar heroes of my generation, a tenacious and influential voice that has endured long after the passing of Woody Guthrie and John Lennon. She joins contemporary, Neil Young, who has persisted challenging the establishment, as well, with songs like Looking for a Leader during the disastrous Bush administration. “He’s wandering among us and we have to seek him out,” Young composed. “May it’s a woman or black man after all.”

Maybe it is a woman, one with cropped, white-streaked hair and a multicolored scarf billowing in the breeze. Baez sends the message – not too loud but still quite clear – that she is on our side, whatever side that might be: Against global warming; for the rights of farm workers; opposed to genocide anywhere on the globe.

It appears many of the gray-haired, comfort-shoe recipients of the message at Stern Grove were among the restless youth who flocked to protest meccas San Francisco and Berkeley in the 60s seeking social change and an end to the war.

Perhaps in looking for a leader, we should look no further than Baez. She leads us in genuine, tried-and-true hymns that bring us to tears, reminding us of all the good one citizen with a set of pipes and conviction can do. How many leaders do you know who can do that?

Images: Luanne Bradley

The post Joan Baez: Striking a Folksy Chord with Iran & Other Causes of the Day appeared first on EcoSalon.