BoingBoinglinks to a story on a blog called crapolicio.us titled "Allegedly 'Green' Bumbershoot Crapoliciously Forces Concert-Goers to Throw Away Hundreds of Bottles of Water.  The gist of the story is that at the 37-year-old Bumbershootfestival in Seattle on Saturday (1 Sep), security guards forced everyone to ditch their water bottles, most of which were full or partly full.  Notes in the comments section of BoingBoing's post suggest that this might have been in response to idiots throwing full bottles of water at various band members the prior year.

From what I can tell from the comments threads, patrons could buy bottled water inside, but the bottles were immediately decanted into disposable cups, as were the other beverages including bottled beer.  There were a handful of water fountains with predictably long lines, and from the volume of comments, it seems that lots of people were pretty upset about the whole thing.

What we have here, folks, is a failure to communicate.  Bumbershoot not only failed to communicate its policy to its customers, it explicitly told them on its websitethat they could bring in plastic bottles of nonalcoholic beverages.  Bumbershoot also failed to communicate to its security staff the message that it was supposedly going green this year, so after making people ditch their water the festival then carted off the bottles to a landfill instead of recycling them. 

Let's take a closer look.  Bumbershoot's food and beverage policy is actually pretty generous for a modern festival.  Quoting from the site:  "You are permitted to bring your own food and non-alcoholic beverages in plastic containers into the Festival."  Aside from the usual restrictions on booze, glass, and cans, that's it.  In an era of promoters who routinely ban outside food and drink so that they can charge extortionate prices from their captive audiences, this is a refreshing change.  The festival's organizer's also went to a good deal of trouble to make the festival greener, from sourcing biodegradable signs to recycling food vendors' grease for biodiesel to promoting carpools and public transit. 

So what happened?  My best guess is that for some reason or another, someone in their security division independently decided that bottled water was a security risk and independently decided to ban bottled water.  The result, as always happens when you treat your customers like criminals, was to piss off a bunch of otherwise peaceful music-lovers. 

This little fiasco should have stopped there--with a bunch of people upset with festival management over what is, at the end of the day, a security-related incident.  Instead, the green movement got taken down with the festival by people who note the hypocrisy of claiming to be green but forcing people to chuck plastic bottles full of perfectly good water into the trash.  Now any number of people who only read the headlines may equate being green with being inconvenienced, or worse yet may regard attempts at sustainability as mere marketing BS with no substance behind them.

Bottled water is decidedly un-green, and forcing people to throw away bottles of water which are then disposed of in a landfill is even less sustainable.  There are plenty of ways the festival could have handled this better, starting with communicating with patrons that water bottles wouldn't be allowed in early in the process.  If the promoters were worried about water bottles flying around, they could have encouraged people to bring in plastic mugs and provided adequate supplies of potable water. They also could have sold branded souvenir mugs and allowed people to fill these up with ice-water at beer stations as part of the fee for the cups, so that people willing to pay could skip the long lines at free water stations.  This would give people a way to skip lines at free water stations and partially offset the revenue losses from not selling bottled water.  Instead, they chose the worst possible solution--banning refillable bottles, communicating the policy poorly, not making enough water available, and selling cups full of bottled water instead of cups of municipal water.

Here's hoping that the festival gets its act together soon, and that we soon have some sort of independent rating system which will help clarify for festival-goers just what a festival means when it claims to be "green."