Goldenvoice’s Coachella Music and Arts Festival has phased out single-use plastic straws, making it the first festival in the world to align with Lonely Whale’s ‘For A Strawless Ocean,’ an open-source guide to reduce plastic pollution. According to Lonely Whale, across the United States, nearly 500 million plastic straws are used and tossed each day, amounting to approximately 12 million pounds of plastic waste each year.
The initiative coincides with Earth Month 2018 and also will be implemented at the upcoming Stagecoach: California’s Country Music Festival taking place April 27-29, 2018, in Indio, CA. Vendors throughout both festivals are replacing plastic straws with marine-degradable paper straws, as part of each festival’s sustainability efforts which include waste and recycling programs.
“Plastic pollution is a huge problem around the world, and it’s exciting to pioneer change by phasing out the use of single-use plastics from our festivals,” states Mapi Moran, Director of Festival Marketing for Goldenvoice. “Our new straw policy is estimated to eliminate about 300,000 plastic straws from Coachella and Stagecoach. We look forward to announcing similar initiatives later that go beyond just plastic straws.”
Time Magazine cites, “Single-use plastics are just one of the myriad plastic products that add up to a total of 300 million tons of plastic waste created every year… While plastic straws are just a fraction of the plastic pollution problem, they are our gateway into the larger ocean health conversation…Scientists estimate that by 2050 there will be more plastic in our ocean than fish.”
Goldenvoice’s straw policy at Coachella and Stagecoach are part of AEG’s industry-leading corporate sustainability program, AEG 1EARTH. The 10-year old program focuses on reducing AEG’s global environmental impact.