Getting an artist, their entourage, their band and backup singers equipment and set pieces from one venue to the next is an art in itself. Transportation requires a lot of precise planning and can be pricy and problematic.
With many tours using multiple buses and trucks to haul around their people and stuff, another big concern is the damage this does to the environment. Many tour and trucking operators, aware of the effects on the earth from all those emissions into the air, and all the waste the tour produces, have been trying to find solutions that make touring greener.
Several have tried environmentally friendly biodiesel fuel; some are using straight vegetable oil (SVO), which uses a blend of vegetable oil, and others have chosen to offset their carbon footprint by encouraging green practices in other areas. Venues Today spoke with several tour operators to explore how going green is working.
Greenvans started in 2008 with a mission to save time, money, frustration — and the environment. “We support touring musicians who are as passionate about making a positive impact on the environment as they are about their music,” said Andy Reitz, president, Greenvans.
“In 2008 we converted a van to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO) and started Greenvans,” he said. “Yes, we were mad scientists at the time, but we saw how much of an environmental impact touring had, and we thought we could make a small but useful contribution to the green initiative in the music industry.”
“There aren’t a lot of affordable options out there for bands that want to tour green so we’re glad to be a small way for bands to reduce their environmental impact on the road,” said Reitz.
In its nine-year history, Greenvans has served hundreds of environmentally-minded tours including Sonic Bids, Naysayer and Zion.
“There are more and more artists every day who think it’s important to be proactive about going green in any way they can,” said Reitz. “We’re a step in the right direction.”
Doug Oliver is the GM of Pioneer Coach, a company that leases entertainer coaches to musicians. They have a fleet of 40 sleeper vehicles that have eight to 12 beds, lounges and kitchens, and cost around $800,000 each. Rentals cost around $1,500-$1,800 a day and includes fuel, liability insurance and the driver.
On average, tours use two buses, but some bigger tours, like stadium tours, use five to 10 buses. The average lease is a couple months long, some deals are annual, but they’ve done multiyear leases as well.
Some of their clients have been the Avett Brothers, James Taylor, Brandi Carlile, Kenny Rogers and Old Dominion.
Oliver said that the company made a push into biodiesel several years ago, which Oliver describes as “a traditional diesel with a blend of vegetable oil in it. Our engines only allow b10 (10 percent vegetable oil) or less. Simply put, it uses less energy.”
The biodiesel performs better during warm months and during the colder months. It will leave a paraffin wax that causes problems, he said.
“We found that bio-diesel costs more and you have to change the fuel filters more often,” said Oliver. “We leave it up to artist to decide if they want to pay the premium to use bio-diesel.”
Diesel prices are a big expenditure in the cost of touring. “It’s something we watch constantly,” said Oliver.
Kevin Lyman, CEO for Fini.com, runs the Warped Tour, the longest running touring festival in North America. The tour plays 38 to 43 dates from Boston to Miami to San Diego to Seattle. “Trying to go in a straight line is hard,” said Lyman.
Warped Tour just finished its latest route in August with bands including GWAR, Andy Black and Neck Deep. The tour took 16 buses and 18 trucks, and Lyman said that 15 percent of the Warped Tour budget goes to travel.
The tour has been exploring green practices for over a decade and made the switch to biodiesel in 2006, Lyman said. “The thing with biodiesel is that we had to figure out what independent distributors of biodiesel there were across the country, which was a challenge.”
But Warped Tour made it work — until 2012 when the government took away the tax incentives for the biodiesel manufacturers. “We got hung up by highway robbery,” he said. “We had to give them (biodiesel sellers) a credit card and we had to order 5,000 gallons at a time, whether we used it or not. Then they started making us pay up to $6 a gallon for the biofuel.”
Lyman weighed the extreme costs attached to biodiesel and determined the program was financially prohibitive and ultimately unsustainable, but he didn’t want to abandon the tour’s concerns for offsetting energy use.
“We looked at the cost difference between diesel and biodiesel, and we decided the best approach was to use the difference to fund other green initiatives. It felt better than paying over-the-top prices for the biodiesel,” he said.
Using the funds, Warped Tour now gives away reusable shopping bags and encourages people to use them throughout the year. They also use sustainable corn-based forks and knives. “In the beginning, we had to carry the forks and knives on our buses, but we convinced (food provider giant) Sysco to stock them so we could get them in each market.” Warped Tour also pays for ‘eco-teams,’ which are recycling squads who collect bottles and plastics after the shows. They also built a solar stage out of a SL250 and used it on tour.
Warped Tour encourages ridesharing services and carpooling. “We did deals with Lyft and Uber and we’ve done buses with Rally Bus, where kids can go to a central point and get travel to the shows. We want to encourage getting people to the shows in a more efficient and less energy wasting way,” he said.
A graduate student did his masters on how to make Warped Tour net-zero waste and said they could do it in three years. “We only got to 60 percent,” he said. “I need to sit down and see how we can get to 100 percent.”
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