Anytime you assemble 75,000 people in one place there will undoubtedly be some waste — and especially when those people are hungry, thirsty music fans and that place is the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, one of the largest and most ambitious festivals of any kind in the United States.
Bonnaroo is only in its ninth year, but the four-day festival, held over the second weekend of June, has been pushing the limits of what was thought possible for a big festival like this ever since the overwhelming success of the first one in 2002 — an event I was lucky enough to attend. But I’ve also been fortunate to attend the last few years and get a behind-the-scenes peak at Bonnaroo’s massive sustainability undertaking.
Festival organizers Superfly Productions/AC Entertainment began composting at Bonnaroo six years ago, but it was 2008 when organizers were faced with the problem of having too much compostable material and nowhere to put it. The successful effort to divert waste from the landfill produced more organic waste than any of the local waste companies could accept. 
Fortunately for organizers, they were also blessed to be in the unusual position of owning almost all of the 650-acre festival site. So instead of trucking off the organic materials to an off-site facility and incurring the additional fuel and dumping costs, they launched a festival-wide on-site composting program, an effort that tripled compost collection between 2008 and 2009, Bonnaroo sustainability coordinator Laura Sohn told me on a golf cart tour of the festival’s composting and recycling infrastructure.
The plates and utensils used by Bonnaroo’s food vendors must be biodegradable and according to Sohn, “there have been a couple cases where vendors were not allowed back” if they used plastic cups, plates and utensils. And the threat of not being allowed back must work: of the hundreds of vendors working both inside the festival grounds and in the campgrounds, I did not see a single one hand out a plastic cup, knife or spork.
Sohn credits the 500 blue-shirted ‘Trash Talkers’ for the uptick in waste diversion over the last couple years. Working several short shifts throughout the weekend in exchange for a free pass to the festival, a $240 value proposition, the Trash Talkers keep a close eye on their bins — and what goes in them.
Education is a critical component of any successful composting/recycling program. The better educated people are about what waste goes where, the easier it is to sort and get the waste moving in the appropriate waste stream.
Also, the better the education efforts and buy-in on the part of festival attendees, the less the Trash Talkers have to go in and rescue misplaced waste.
The bulk of waste (recyclables, compost, landfill) is wrangled by the concert waste management experts, Clean Vibes. But festival attendees can collect and pre-sort trash and recycling and bring them to the Clean Vibes tent in Centeroo in exchange for merchandise. For example, one plastic bottle gets one point, and you can get a T-shirt for 500 to 1,000 points.
After organic waste is collected, it is taken to the composting pad where a team of shockingly enthusiastic pickers give the organic waste another thorough sort.
No matter the scale, a good compost pile will have the right proportion of wet and dry material. Too much moisture in a compost heap, if not properly mixed with drier material (like the woodchips pictured above) will stunt decomposition in the compost pile, causing it to rot, not decompose.
Throughout the festival, Bonnaroo’s on-site groundskeeper will fold-in woodchips to the fresh organic waste. And throughout the year, the groundskeeper also turns the pile, after it has reached the proper temperature. This pile of black gold compost pictured above is the direct result of Bonnaroo’s 2009 composting program.
Fully closing the loop, compost produced by Bonnaroo’s new on-site composting program is used to grow flowers and vegetables in the demonstration garden at Planet Roo, the center of Bonnaroo’s sustainability action.
Photos: Richard Allen/LiveOAK Media
One Comment
That’s how things should work–too bad others can’t behave similarly!!
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