Planet Bluegrass reduces waste by limiting plastic bottles

Planet Bluegrass sends message in a bottle

By Katherine Weadley

Planet Bluegrass is getting off the bottle. The plastic water bottle, that is. In their on-going efforts towards carbon neutrality Planet Bluegrass banned the sale of plastic water bottles from their most recent festival event, The 35^th Telluride Bluegrass Festival. They intend to do the same for their upcoming RockyGrass and Folks Festival and the music schools attached to each event.

Steve Symanski, vice-president of Planet Bluegrass recently spoke about this process on National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth,” radio show. “Living on Earth” is a weekly environmental news and information program distributed by Public Radio International. Every week approximately 300 public radio stations broadcast the show that focuses on a broad range of ecological issues.

Bruce Gellerman interviewed Symanski about Planet Bluegrass’ environmental strategy. According to Symanski, Planet Bluegrass used an easily-composted corn plastic water bottle in 2004 as a viable alternative to the plastic water bottle. In his radio interview he says, “Part of the thing is we've really been mandating at the festival now is everything in the festival grounds must be recyclable or compostable. We were touting it off, look at us, we're cool, we have the ability to throw this in our compost pile,” Symanski said.

Symanski continued, “We've come to realize through lots of reading and other dialogues we've had that bottles, no matter what you're doing you still have a waste stream, you still have to drive it somewhere, you still have that carbon footprint, so why not get rid of the bottles entirely? That's kind of one of our new initiatives this year is to really go back to drinking local water so we're pretty excited that we're going to have a wonderful, free filtered water station for all our audience and they can bring a reusable bottle and let's not have any plastic at the festival.”

Planet Bluegrass will set up water stations for people to use during Rocky Grass Festival in July and the Folks Festival in August. According to Brian Eyster of Planet Bluegrass the water initiative worked really well at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. “In the audience, we served 10,160 gallons of water. We have about 10,000 people per day in Telluride, so that’s about a bottle fill-up per person per day. That amount of water dispensed from the station is the equivalent of 3,387 cases of 16oz water bottles,” Eyster said. In our post-festival online surveys, 72% of the festivarians said they used the water station at “every possible opportunity.” And 94% of the festivarians said they used it at least once.

In an effort to send the message to the audience and beyond Planet Bluegrass provided their artists with Kleen Kanteens. These are reusable stainless steel water containers made from the same steel that is often found in brewing industries. According to the Kleen Kanteen Web site the containers retail for about $20. Planet Bluegrass will sell Kleen Kanteens at their Country Store during the festivals.

Eyster said that their sustainability initiatives came together really well. “The artists really did use their stainless steel Klean Kanteens and vendors only sold one-liter or larger bottles of water.

Oil is used to make and transport water bottles, which contributes to the environmental impact of the water bottle. Also, despite the fact most water bottles are recyclable very few of the bottles actually get recycled. According to Doug James of Cornell University it is estimated that in 2005 alone approximately 30 billion plastic water bottles were purchased, with only about 12% recycled.

Also contributing to the environmental concerns about the use of water bottles is the toxic chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA). It is used in the creation of plastic water bottles, plastic baby bottles and many food containers. According to a press release from the Federal During Administration the FDA recently formed an agency-wide BPA task force to facilitate cross-agency review of current research and new information on BPA for all FDA regulated products.

As part of the evaluation, the FDA Task Force is reviewing the concerns presented in the National Toxicology Program (NTP) Draft Brief published on April 14, 2008 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The press release states “Based on our ongoing review, we believe there is a large body of evidence that indicates that FDA-regulated products containing BPA currently on the market are safe and that exposure levels to BPA from food contact materials, including for infants and children, are below those that may cause health effects.”

However, BPA can be released from plastic into food when heated, washed, or exposed to acidic foods according to a study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives which is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Plastic water bottles aren’t popular at Planet Bluegrass and their hope is that not only that people don’t choose to bring plastic water bottles to the festival but that people everywhere start drinking locally using environmentally friendly containers for their water.

This article ran in the July 2008 issue of the Redstone Review.