Energy Consumption at Live Music Events
Hi everyone!!
Now that I’ve gone through both Noise and Plastic pollution, let’s move on to Air pollution. Although other forms of pollution such as plastic pollution will ultimately lead to air pollution when the waste is incinerated in landfills, and release toxic gases into the environment, I would consider those to be indirect forms of air pollution.
What I will be focusing on in this post will be the direct forms of air pollution caused by music festivals and concerts. Energy consumption is often overlooked by many people when thinking of pollution as it’s not something that can really be seen with your own eyes. However, the pollution generated through this means is very significant.
Energy Consumption at the Event
Music festivals especially don’t tend to happen near populated areas, but rather in more remote areas off the grid. That being said, they therefore have to rely mostly on imported power from generators rather than pre established energy sources. As such, the energy used during these festivals are provided through the constant burning of fossil fuels.
According to Bellwood rewinds, a production company for generators in the UK, “festivals can use over 30,000 MW of electricity over one weekend which is similar to the equivalent of electricity that the people of the city of bath would use”. They also mention there to be an estimated 250 generators used at some festivals which equates to around 16,000 gallons of fuel burnt from one festival alone.
In 2015 Powerful Thinking UK released an environmental impact report and vision for its festival industry, which stated the many ways in which festivals in the UK have negatively impacted the environment as well as their future plans to try and reduce this impact. According to the report “only 3% of UK festival energy demand was being met through waste vegetable oil biodiesel and less than 1% of overall energy supply was being met through other temporary renewable energy technologies”. This means that majority of the energy used during UK festivals or provided through unrenewable energy sources as can be seen in the diagram below.
Travel Emissions
While energy consumption at the event itself makes up a large portion of CO2 emissions, according to EDM “the largest source of emissions from music festivals is without a doubt attendee travel”. World famous music festivals such as Glastonbury (540,000 people) and Coachella (750,000 people) appeal to a global audience and thus people come from all over the world to attend these festivals. People would travel hundreds of miles by various means of transportation just to attend these large festivals.
According to the environmental report released by a powerful thinking, “Travel typically constitutes around 80% of a festivals total known CO2 emissions”. However, these statistics only account for attendees of the festival alone and do not account for the emissions created by the staff, artist, management and all other organisers of the event. Considering that the organizers of the event as well as the artist have to bring in large amounts of equipment, musical instruments, stage sets, cameras and other gear, the amount of travel emissions they produce is most likely to be a lot higher than that of the attendees.
Because of the negative environmental impacts such as the large amounts of CO2 emissions are being produced by concerts and music festivals all over the world, some artists and Music Festival organisers are starting to take notice. Some notable ones being the band Coldplay as well as music festivals such as Glastonbury who are now taking steps to try and decrease the negative impact they have on our environment. I’ll be talking about call plays decision to stop touring in my next post so stay tuned for that.
References:
Powering a Music Festival – Generators. (2020, May 04). Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.bellwoodrewinds.co.uk/power-major-music-festival/
Baker, B. (2019, November 02). How Music Festivals are Destroying the Earth [Opinion]. Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://edm.com/opinion/environmental-impact-festivals
Thinking, P. (2015). The show must go on: Environmental impact report and vision for the UK festival industry.
Paton, A., McCullen, P., & House, M. (2014, July). What effects do UK music festivals have on the environment & how can they become more environmentally friendly?. In Contemporary Perspectives in Tourism and Hospitality Research: Policy, practice and performance (pp. 0-0).