Live at Squamish and the big names slated to perform at next month's festival will try to have a huge impact on the Squamish area while taking initiatives to make a smaller impact on the environment.
Event organizers have teamed up with two major partners to help reduce the impact the local festival and others like it can have on the natural world.
Bullfrog Power is a company that delivers energy in a natural way, and has become a major part of Live at Squamish. According to Paul Runnals, executive producer of Live at Squamish, it's simply a matter of replacing the energy the festival has already used.
"We calculate what our power consumption is and they place an equal amount of green power back onto the grid, so effectively replacing the used power with green power," Runnals said.
The other major contributor to the event's green initiative is a company called Pacific Green.
"We've had a relationship for many years with Pacific Green, a carbon offsetting company. Essentially we're using dirty power, we're offsetting that in the form of carbon offsets to sort of neutralize the footprint of the event on an environmental level," Runnals said.
The collaboration with the two companies is a huge step in reducing the impact on the environment and as far as energy usage goes, this is about as good as it gets, he said.
"Last year the festival ran entirely off of diesel generator power. This year we're not using any generators; we're running off hydroelectric power and feeding that power back onto the grid, and offsetting the carbon footprint from it. We're about as green as can be on the power side of things.
"You could argue that our impact in terms of power consumption is zero both in terms of usage because we replace power, but also in terms of the carbon footprint because we're offsetting that," he said.
Energy initiatives are just one way festival organizers are trying to reduce the size of the festival's environmental footprint.
"We're doing all the things you see at major events. We have recycling programs and composting programs for all the backstage areas. We're introducing the zero waste stations and those sorts of things. We've forbidden our concessioners from bringing styrofoam and plastic containers into the site. We're often finding ourselves challenged to find newer and better ways to be greening these events," Runnals said.
It's one thing to introduce methods of reducing waste, but it's another to get people to use them. According to Runnals, therein lies the challenge of trying to make big events like Live at Squamish as green as they can be.
"Zero waste initiatives are ambitious. To truly be effective you have to have zero contamination between compostable vs. recycle vs. trash. The mechanism by which you achieve those processes needs to be fine tuned, because at the end of the day you have to ask the concert-goers to pause to sort their garbage. There's a lot of education that has to happen and a lot of willingness from the general public to participate in it," he said.
"You have to slowly shift public opinion much in the way that recycling has become pretty well established, but do people compost at events? No, not really. It's a movement that's begun, but it comes down to educating the public and convincing them that it's worth the time that it takes."
Live at Squamish organizers continue looking for ways to expand their green initiatives, but there's only so much they can do. It's also up to concert-goers to do their part in reducing their impact when the festival hits town Aug. 20 and 21.
"We're part the solution, but we're not the only part. We're just trying to do our part to keep people moving to a more enlightened way of dealing with events and the footprint events in both waste and carbon," Runnals said.
For more information on Live at Squamish visit www.liveatsquamish.com.
