When I first went to Bonnaroo in 2004, about the only visible green action was the site's recycling.  I hadn't anticipated that things would be much different this time around, but I was wrong.  Sometime in the last couple of years, Superfly decided to go all-in to the green movement.  From the press release, here's a list of Bonnaroo's greening initiatives for 2007:

• Over 30,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel (B99) replaced diesel for non-music stage generators
• WastAway refuse handled process of recycling over 250 tons of garbage
• Concession food served with biodegradable wraps, plates, cups and cutlery manufactured from a renewable resource
• Festival-wide recycling and composting program was implemented
• Implemented methods to offset all festival and band emissions
• Allowed attendees to purchase energy credits to offset their own emissions for travel to the festival
• Solar stage and sound system ran by solar power
• Presents a full line of organic cotton t-shirts
• Used tree-free posters
• Used post-consumer recycled toilet paper for portolets
• Used 100% recycled paper (30% post-consumer) for all of the program and administrative needs
• Used VOC-free paint and thus eliminated 1,260 lbs of Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions from this year's footprint
• Expanded Planet Roo to focus on exposing festival attendees to organic lifestyles, renewable energies, and environmental and social issues
• Introduced 5 electric golf carts into the fleet of production vehicles

 Let's look at these one by one:

Over 30,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel (B99) replaced diesel for non-music stage generators
This is great news.  Bonnaroo is held on what used to be a horse farm, although Superfly recently bought the majority of the property.  It's pastoral nature, including the lack of power lines, made it an ideal location for one of the world's biggest parties.  But the logistics of the site prevented Superfly from connecting to the grid, which means the entire event runs on generator power.  I won't elaborate on the benefits of biodiesel, which are covered extensively around the web at sites like Wikipedia and BrevardBiodiesel.org, but suffice it to say that this is a great first step for Bonnaroo.  Biodiesel and generator power aren't perfect solutions, however, and I'll discuss ways to improve on this in a future post.  One thing I have to clarify is why they didn't use biodiesel for the music stage generators.

WastAway refuse handled process of recycling over 250 tons of garbage
Here's the blurb on WastAway from the Bonnaroo site:

WastAway has developed a revolutionary recycling process that recycles unsorted household garbage into safe and useful raw material called Fluff®. The patented equipment grinds, shreds, and processes the garbage in high heat and pressure. The end product, Fluff, is useful as a growing media and has been extruded to make composite timbers for park benches and other products.  250 tons of Bonnaroo garbage will now be recycled with WastAway. To see the results of this unique process, be sure to stop by Planet Roo and have a seat on one of the WastAway park benches made from garbage! For more information visit www.wastaway.com

The WastAway website talks a lot about patented processes and valuable end-products, but it doesn't answer some questions I had about the actual nuts and bolts of the process.  They say that they "reduce pathogens to a non-detectable level" with "high heat and pressure," but that's about all the info we get.  I'd like to know if there's a stack involved and to find out how much energy the process uses.

Besides the growing media and composite timbers, WastAway is now touting its fluff as a possible energy source.  The company is pursuing it both as a source of ethanol and as as source of syngas, a fuel stock in gasification.  Both of these seem like much better uses of the product than composite timbers, but there are still lingering CO2 concerns caused by the burning of ethanol or syngas.  I'd like to see how the company's energy products stack up against plasma gasification in an independent analysis.  But in any event, it's clearly better to have this waste taken to WastAway's facility than to a lined landfill.  My main question is why isn't Superfly sending 100% of Bonnaroo's waste to WastAway?

Concession food served with biodegradable wraps, plates, cups and cutlery manufactured from a renewable resource
This was a surprise to me.  All of the concessionaires are now using what I'm told is corn-based plastic.  Corn is by no means a perfect solution, as anyone who's read the Omnivore's Dilemma can tell you, but it beats using regular plastic for plates, cups, and cutlery.  This stuff is designed to be composted after use, and many of the Centeroo area waste stations had three bins:  trash, recycling, and composting.  The downside is that I wouldn't have known that these things were compostable if I hadn't been told by the volunteers at the Green Pod, and the composting bins were relatively scarce and poorly explained.  I think the majority of the biodegradable food service items probably ended up in the trash.  But I give the organization points for trying, and at least they avoided using virgin plastic made from imported oil, fertilizer issues notwithstanding.

Festival-wide recycling and composting program was implemented
It would be really hard for the organizers to do more to encourage recycling than they already are.  The message is drilled in from the minute you arrive at the festival, when you're given two plastic bags, one for trash and one for recycling.  There are recycling bins at every turn, and  staffers give out gifts to people who bring back full bags of recyclables, Clean Vibes, long an active player in festival cleanup and waste management, says it recycled 56% of the trash generated at Bonnaroo in 2006 and is working to get this number even higher this year. Unfortunately, plenty of concert goers still didn't seem to get the message.  Even members of my own group tossed their recyclables in with the trash, which was pretty discouraging.  But from an organizational standpoint, I think it's safe to say that Bonnaroo is doing everything it can to promote recycling.

The composting component was a lot less visible.  If I hadn't been told about the corn-based food service items, I wouldn't have known about them, and I didn't notice a dedicated composting bin until Saturday, although there were several scattered around Centeroo.  But Clean Vibes reports composting about 10 tons of waste in 2006, so maybe a lot of the action is happening behind the scenes.  It would be nice to see the composting aspect more heavily promoted and better explained.

Here are some stats ripped from the Bonnaroo website for 2006:

• Total Waste Recycled = 146,980 pounds / 73.49 tons
• Total Food Waste and biodegradable Products Composted = 21,260 pounds / 10.63 tons
• Total Waste sent to WastAway = 405,920 pounds / 202.96 tons
• Total Amount of Waste diverted from the Landfill = 574,160 pounds /287.08 tons
• Total Trash sent to Middle TN Landfill = 446,258 pounds of trash / 223.129 tons
• Total Waste Produced at Bonnaroo 2006 = 1,020,418 pounds / 510.209 tons

Clean vibes says that it recycled 56% of all the waste generated at the festival, but this is somewhat misleading.  It's more fair to say that Bonnaroo diverted that amount of waste from the landfill.  The actual recycling number is closer to 15%, with another 2% composted and about 39% sent to WastAway to make their fluff.  Since that fluff might end up being burned for energy, like an incinerator but a little cleaner, some might question whether it meets the spirit of the word "recycling." 

Semantics aside, it's clear that Superfly is committed to reducing its waste footprint.  I'd like to see them focus more on waste reduction, perhaps working with Anheuser-Busch to find a way to sell more corn-based cups and fewer bottles made from virgin plastic.  I'm sure they could do a lot to encourage their other vendors to produce less waste.

Implemented methods to offset all festival and band emissions
I don't know exactly what this means, but I assume it involves the purchase of carbon offsets.  Whether you love them or hate them, carbon offsets are still a good deal better than business as usual, and it looks like they're here to stay.  I think this is a good move, and I'm convinced from talking to Rich that Superfly will work to limit the amount of emissions they have to offset in the future.

Allowed attendees to purchase energy credits to offset their own emissions for travel to the festival
I didn't see this option when I bought my ticket, although it might have been there.  I also don't see any mention of this on the Greening section of the Bonnaroo website.  I'm sure if I poked eround long enough I would have found this, but it clearly could have been better implemented.  With tickets and fees already nearing the $250 mark for the festival already, why not just tack on a few dollars more, make an educated guess at the total emissions of travel to the festival, and buy offsets for the whole event?  I can't imagine it would add more than a couple of dollars to an already-high ticket price.

Solar stage and sound system ran by solar power
This was really cool.  In the Planet Roo area, they had a small stage set up next to a bank of solar panels which provided power to the stage.  I asked Rich about expanding this concept to the whole festival, but apparently the logistics and economics of it aren't quite right yet.  It would be great to see this on a much larger scale as the technology matures and prices come down.  With all the investment happening in solar right now, we might see one of the main stages go solar in a year or two. 

Presents a full line of organic cotton t-shirts
Kudos.  Bonnaroo is one of the largest names I've seen really make a firm stance on this over less expensive conventional cotton. I haven't clarified yet whether all of the concert T's were organic, but the one I bought was it was even though it wasn't specially marked as organic on the display.  There are other options that might be even better than organic cotton, but I'll discuss those in a future post. 

Used tree-free posters
To be honest, I have no idea what this means.  I didn't get a good look at the posters they were selling, and I certainly didn't see any promotional posters here in Boston.  Whether the posters were made from hemp, recycled plastic, or another material, it's further evidence that Superfly is taking greening seriously.

Used post-consumer recycled toilet paper for portolets
 Not much to say here--this is a great thing through and through, unlike the portolets themselves.

Used 100% recycled paper (30% post-consumer) for all of the program and administrative needs
This is a great step, but 100% post-consumer recycled paper is easy to find and relatively low-cost, so why not go all the way?  Still, this beats using virgin pulp.

Used VOC-free paint and thus eliminated 1,260 lbs of Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions from this year's footprint
This is another really positive step that shows that Bonnaroo gets the green message.  Like conventional cotton, there's really no excuse for using paint with VOC's anymore. 

Expanded Planet Roo to focus on exposing festival attendees to organic lifestyles, renewable energies, and environmental and social issues
This touches on one of the most important aspects of the greening of 'roo:  education.  People come to Bonnaroo from all walks of life.  They're young, old, rich, poor, right-wing, left-wing, green and not-so-green.  The majority of people at the festival had probably never seen a lot of this stuff in action before.  Exposing people to green products and running the festival in an environmentally and socially responsible manner demonstrates to the audience that this stuff is no longer conceptual.  Bonnaroo deserves a lot of credit for acting as a platform to get people more involved in the new environmental movement.

That said, many of the exhibitors still come across as partisan and preachy.  Environmentalism is tantalizingly close to becoming so mainstream that we don't even think about it in political terms anymore, but you wouldn't know that from the exhibitors.  Planet Roo, unfortunately, left me cold.  I didn't feel like being preached to, and offering me a choice between seeing Kings of Leon or The Hold Steady or sitting in on an educational seminar about solar panels didn't feel like much of a choice at all.  I think there's still a lot of room to grow in this arena.  But again, Bonnaroo gets major points for trying, and hopefully future efforts will be more appealing to the masses. 

Introduced 5 electric golf carts into the fleet of production vehicles
Electric golf carts, despite their superior environmental performance, aren't suited for this kind of event.  They have a limited range and need to be recharged for several hours before they can be reused.  That's hardly ideal if you're trying to organize an event that runs for over 100 hours straight, covers hundreds of acres, and isn't powered by the grid.  I can't imagine what a hassle it was for Superfly to deal with electric golf carts during the event.  I hope that overall it was a positive experience, but I wouldn't fault them if they went back to gas-powered carts in the future. 

So there you have it--a full breakdown of Bonnaroo's environmental activity.  Overall, they've done a top-notch job of trying to balance their environmental footprints against their need to show people a good time.  But there's still plenty of room for improvement, and in a future post I'll make some suggestions. 

Stay tuned:  next up, just in time for the Live Earth Concerts on 7.7, I'll review the new green event standards developed for the concerts.