The Good Earth: REVERB Celebrates 20 Years Of Making Touring More Sustainable

When Adam Gardner, guitarist and vocalist of the band Guster, met his wife, Lauren Sullivan, while at Tufts University in 1992, he was intrigued by her passion for environmentalism. She’s gone on to earn her masters in Environmental Education from the National Audubon Society Expedition Institute at Lesley University and, during the first 12 years of their relationship, she spent countless hours listening to Gardner talk about the abundance of waste he saw while on tour. The two of them eventually came to realize they could become the change they hoped to see in the world, and the duo founded the sustainability-minded non-profit REVERB.

When they first launched REVERB in 2004, sustainability and the environment weren’t top of mind for most people. Al Gore had lost the presidential election four years prior, and his game-changing film “An Inconvenient Truth” wouldn’t come out for another two years. “Climate change” wasn’t yet a well-known term.

Brittany Howard, Dave Matthews Pay Tribute To REVERB

“In my music bubble, I was talking to other musicians and we were all shrugging our shoulders like, ‘It’s too bad it’s such a mess out here on tour and this isn’t what we really want, but I guess this is the way it is,’” Gardner says. “I think me explaining that to Lauren and her desire to bring environmentalism into the mainstream and seeing how music is such a powerful platform to reach the mainstream and knowing, ‘Oh, wow There’s a bunch of artists that aren’t feeling good about what they’re doing and would probably want to support the movement. We’ve got something here.’”

The concept of REVERB really started to take shape when Gardner’s sister mailed them a pamphlet on Bonnie Raitt’s Green Highway, a traveling eco-village that provided fan information on alternative energy solutions. The two realized that artists were already hopping on board with more sustainable touring practices, and thus, in 2004, REVERB was born.

They started with Canadians: Barenaked Ladies and Alanis Morissette on their “Oh, Naturale Tour” 20 years ago. Sullivan borrowed Guster’s van and chased along the tour. She admits that first tour wasn’t the most sustainable with her driving and leap-frogging between dates as some were just too far a drive to make in time.

“One of the biggest hurdles was having the artists understand the programming that we could bring forth on tour,” Sullivan says. “We’d say, ‘Hey, can we have a bus bunk? Can we be folded into your tour and embedded as one of your people, just like a guitar tech or a drum tech, and we’ll be the sustainability folks?’ Getting that kind of bunk allocation was a big deal, because it’s completely different programmatically if you can do that. It elevated the work we were doing and really being seen as part of the tour.”

Two decades later, the 501(c)(3) has hopped onto tours with the likes of Dave Matthews Band (one of their first artist partnerships), Billie Eilish, ODESZA, Lumineers and more. They’ve prevented the use of more than 4 million single-use water bottles with their Rock N Refill program since 2013, neutralized 390,000 tons of Co2 and raised $16.7 million for environmental causes, according to REVERB.

Sullivan and Gardner say that perhaps one of the biggest moments for them since beginning REVERB was when Eilish brought them on tour with her. As one of the highest-grossing artists, ranking at No. 28 on Pollstar’s Year-End Worldwide chart in 2022, she was able to use her voice and platform to educate fans about sustainability. It was the largest reach REVERB had yet.

“Sustainability has been a top priority for me and my team throughout my career,” Eilish tells Pollstar. “From the start, I knew that we wanted to do things differently and reduce the negative impact of touring on the planet, but it was hard to know how to make change. When we were introduced to REVERB it was a big help. We knew we weren’t alone; there was this whole organization dedicated to making live music more sustainable. They’ve become a real partner, and an important part of my team. I feel like together – hopefully – we can change things in this industry for the better.”

Eilish also managed to convince Lollapalooza to utilize solar energy for the mainstage when she headlined the festival in 2023. The REVERB team shares that those moments are encouraging for them, especially because if a venue or festival does it once, they’ll likely do it again even without REVERB being there.

“Once we got the industry to do it once, it’s hard to go backwards,” Director of Partnerships Tanner Watt says. “When a hundred thousand fans see Billie Eilish do a performance at the mainstage at Lollapalooza that’s powered by solar batteries, it’s really hard for Live Nation, Lollapalooza and C3 to not try and at least meet that bar, if not go past it, the next time. Fans see it, fans expect it, fans want it and fans will demand it. A big part of what we do is encouraging the industry and, more than that, encouraging the fans to demand the industry make these changes.”

Headquartered in the small coastal city of Portland, Maine, the nonprofit today still has staff embedded as part of the crew on artists’ tours in order to be their sustainability experts. The organization has 12 people on its team, all working with artists and venues to ensure that sustainability considerations are made while plotting out and embarking on tours.

“When I first started with REVERB, we had to really beg and go hunting for artists and convince folks to let us come out on the road,” says Watt. “With climate being a much more obvious issue, something that most people are concerned with or at least aware of, we have lots more artists coming to us. Part of my job is having conversations with (artists) as they come to us, but most of the folks that we’ve been bringing in are either folks coming to us or other partners we have connecting us with folks.”

REVERB works directly with the artists who’ve brought them on to discuss the best ways to keep sustainability in mind for them.

“I work with artist teams and artists themselves to see where their passions are and what their goals are and what they’re wanting to take on,” Director of Projects Lara Seaver says. “It’s not a specific menu we have. But we ask, ‘What do you want to do about water backstage? What do you want to do about water onstage? What do you want as far as figuring out how far you want to try and push the venues? How far do you want to push the merch company?’ And then just work with them to figure out where their goals are and what they’re comfortable with.”

Some artists are willing to push more than others. Eilish has also been working to bring more vegan options into venues alongside REVERB and her mother Maggie Baird’s nonprofit Support+Feed. The singer also makes the effort to often fly commercial, as private jets create a significantly larger carbon footprint.

The work with artists evolves over time. In 2020, for instance, REVERB partnered with The Lumineers to create what was then dubbed a “climate positive” tour. After taking steps on tour to reduce the climate footprint, major tour emissions including travel, venue energy use, and hotel stays were calculated. Then, through funding support of vetted climate projects that measurably reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the tour neutralized significantly more emissions – at least 50% more – than it created, thus having a carbon-negative or climate-positive impact. However, while The Lumineers and REVERB continue to support climate projects to reduce greenhouse emissions, they have moved away from these types of designations.

“It’s a great example of how things are changing in the industry, not only in music but also in the environmental world,” Seaver says. “We’re not using the climate-positive language anymore, even though that was certainly a milestone at the time. It’s really hard to account for the exact footprint of a show. We still calculate all the obvious things, the bus and trucks, the hotel rooms, the venue energy. But did we account for the number of hamburgers sold at concessions and what the impact of that beef is? We always overestimate, sure, but it feels like a false narrative and not necessarily the best place for all the energy to be.”

Seaver adds that it’s hard to measure what each person is personally responsible for, and what the effects are. “It’s interesting to apply it to a concert setting because who’s responsible for the fans all traveling in their individual vehicles to a show? They’re coming to see the artist, but the venue is the one putting on the event. And then the governments are the ones who haven’t provided alternative transportation options in the country. So it snowballs.” Without the ability to estimate how much each butterfly effect impacts the climate, Seaver says that “climate positive” isn’t really a fully attainable goal.

The team also works with other nonprofits, setting up booths in their action village, a place where fans can visit and learn more about sustainability, at venues while on tour with different artists. Paige Roth, director of community and volunteer programs, oversees what organizations are brought in.

“If an artist has a specific cause of their interest in supporting, it’s about trying to find an organization who’s a great fit for that,” Roth says. “For folks who are responsive and organized, a big part of it is virtual and logistics are being run across the world, through email and phone calls. So, nonprofits who are responsive, organized and great at communicating have an important mission and something tangible to bring to the action village.”

When REVERB started 20 years ago, they weren’t as hopeful as they are today. Sullivan would speak among her group of environmentalist friends and they would all nod in agreement that they were doing the right thing, but they hadn’t yet cracked the code of how to bring that to a wider audience.

“If there’s one thing we’ve seen in our 20 years, it’s that there is hope,” Sullivan says. “And it’s not pie-in-the-sky hope – it’s taking meaningful environmental action; it’s empowering others to do the same; it’s seeing partners that we’ve had for two decades pushing for more change in this industry; it’s having new partners join the effort every year and redefining sustainability goals; it’s seeing the results of all that leading to measurable positive impacts. That’s what inspires, builds and sustains hope. That’s what keeps us going.”