Bluegrass Goes Green

The Telluride Bluegrass Festival may be about old time music, but there’s nothing old fashioned about the amenities it provides for thousands of wired-in, green-minded music fans spending five days camping in the Colorado Rockies town.

Besides creating its own wireless network to accommodate campers who simply can’t bear to be separated from their laptops for a weekend, Telluride organizer Planet Bluegrass teamed up with several environmentally friendly companies to reduce refuse in ways that went far beyond mere recycling at the June 16-19 festival.

Even the forks and plates were compostable. Planet Bluegrass contracted with NatureWorks PLA to provide serviceware for some 41,000 meals, including plates, cups and utensils made not of plastic, paper or – heaven forbid – Styrofoam, but made from corn.

In fact, the bluegrass fest was the basis for a case study by the packaging firm in 2004, with the results posted on its Web site.

Water bottles were made from corn-based materials as well, and ample signage around the grounds explained the project and pointed fans to disposal bins labeled “compost.”

According to the 2004 study, 49 percent of the festival’s waste was either composted or recycled, a 20 percent increase over 2003. Festival organizers hoped to increase the percent of compostable/recyclable refuse in 2005 by about the same amount.

“We do a great job of sorting all the stuff out and distinguishing it, so that we end up with a big pile of trash, a big pile of compost and a big pile of recycling,” Planet Bluegrass President Craig Ferguson told Pollstar. “It works great; it works from the financial standpoint, too. You don’t have to pay as much for the landfill costs. It’s not that hard to be responsible.”

With the success of the Telluride project, Project Bluegrass will feature NatureWorks PLA serviceware at all six of its festivals this summer, including RockyGrass, the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival and Festival of the Mabon.

In fact, Ferguson expects those to be even “greener” events than the ones held in Telluride, considering the small mountain town is a four-hour truck haul to the nearest recycling and composting centers. The towns of Lyons and Boulder, where the other festivals are held, have their own such facilities.

“It’s really more of an educational program here in Telluride,” Ferguson said. “We decided to continue the program (at Telluride) even though we weren’t exactly sure that the whole environment wouldn’t be best served by just letting the stuff in the landfill biodegrade.

“But we decided to keep with the same program and improve on it,” he explained. “Our customers understand what we’re doing, and its gotten progressively and significantly better each year as far as the volume of trash has gone down and the amount of recycling and composting has gone up.”

In addition to the composting/recycling project, Planet Bluegrass is looking into running its festival generators on biodiesel. But again, the environmentally conscious organization is taking into consideration the amount of fossil-based fuel it takes to truck it in.

It didn’t seem worth the cost last year, but that could change quickly as the popularity of biodiesel – with the help of such boosters as Willie Nelson – rises. And there’s other ways big festivals can contribute to a smaller footprint on the environment.

“Two years ago, it was like pulling teeth trying to find that stuff, and now it’s all over,” Ferguson said. “We’ve been doing things like buying wind credits and things like that and, you know, it’s not very hard to go ahead and mitigate what you can.”

— Deborah Speer