Can the Canadian music industry become environmentally sustainable?

Blond:ish was in Brazil at a storied venue. From her DJ booth she could see 3,000 people dancing as the sun peeked over the horizon. 

"You're one with the whole crowd in nature — and then the people left, and there was this mountain of plastic water bottles," the Canadian producer remembers. As people cleaned up the site, the plastic mountain got higher and higher. "And then it obstructed my view of the beautiful sunrise and [created] that disconnect of nature versus plastic."

That was five years ago, and having cultivated a successful global DJ career for a decade by that point, Blond:ish realized that, as she put it, influential people in the industry were just "one phone call away," and through that she could make some real change. In 2019, she and now business partner Camille Guitteau co-founded Bye Bye Plastic, an organization dedicated to ridding the music industry of single-use plastics by 2023.

One of the ways Blond:ish hopes to do that is through the organization's free eco rider for musicians, which looks to ban single-use plastics not only onstage during a performance but, ideally, from the entire festival.

"When I started using the eco rider, 100 per cent of my events were using plastic," Blond:ish says. "Now I'm down to 20 per cent. And not even just in the DJ booth, but the actual entire event is single-use plastic-free." More than 1,500 artists have signed up, including Idris Elba and Fatboy Slim. 

2023 was an ambitious target, and one that won't be met, but Blond:ish is certain it will happen in the not-too-distant future. In a year that has seen Canada experience its worst wildfire season yet, producing record levels of carbon emissions and smoke that has reached the U.S. and Europe, ambitious targets are what the music industry needs to become accountable for its role in climate change.

Canada, however, has been slow to make progress.

"I would say with the exception of Hillside [Festival] that we're pretty far behind most of the world," says Kim Fry, referring to the country's standing in climate action at music events. Fry, who's based in Halifax, coordinates the Canadian chapter of Music Declares Emergency, a U.K. organization founded in 2019 that supports musicians and the industry in reducing their climate impact. The Canadian chapter was launched in 2021, and its goal at the time was to get musicians to sign the declaration that includes four calls to action, create general awareness and simply try to, as Fry says, "get a critical mass of people." 

It has since expanded its reach to include workshops, panels and its own Canadian Music Climate Summit, as well as green audits, which assess energy use, waste management and other practices at events. Fry recently finished the training to deliver green audits, but says there are few people who are trained to do it in Canada right now. There's a lot of work to be done, but not enough resources yet.

"We just don't have the people" that other countries do, she says.

No music on a dead planet

"What good are these awards if our planet is dying?" asked Logan Staats from the podium at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa this past June, after receiving a Summer Solstice Indigenous Music Award for radio single of the year for his song "Deadman." 

The Mohawk singer from Six Nations of the Grand River started getting involved with climate activism about three years ago in his own First Nations community for Land Back Lane, where "we have a land claim that we're disputing and fighting right now," says Staats. "Then it branched out to the Wet'suwet'en [when they] made a call for Indigenous land defenders to come to northern B.C."

Staats's time in Wet'suwet'en territory protesting the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline connected him even further to the land, but in late 2021 he was arrested there while protesting and singing. The traumatic experience didn't deter him from pushing forward, though.

"Once I got a taste for Indigenous resistance and how that filled my spirit and my heart, I just knew 100 per cent that I was pouring my blood, sweat and tears in the right place, you know?" he says. 

The singer-songwriter is one of four artists who were chosen by Music Declares Emergency to be part of the 2023 Regina Folk Festival lineup, considering their work for climate action. Artistic director Amber Goodwyn says Music Declares Emergency was the perfect fit as a guest curator this year, particularly because the festival's theme is "Web of Life: music and community in harmony with the Earth."

When I think about the songs I've written that have touched on land and climate and these sorts of things, they're usually wrapped up with a number of other issues because that's how I see it, you know? It's related to capitalism, which is related to racism.​​​- Shad

"Attending other festivals, talking to artists, seeing what artists are focused on and seeing what our community was talking about, it became clear that climate is almost the most important thing we should be talking about right now," says Goodwyn. 

"[Music Declares Emergency's] whole message that there's no music on a dead planet — that's something that also I'm trying to amplify," says Staats. 

Shad, who has worked with Music Declares Emergency before, was also one of the artists chosen for Regina Folk. "When I think about the songs I've written that have touched on land and climate and these sorts of things, they're usually wrapped up with a number of other issues because that's how I see it, you know? It's related to capitalism, which is related to racism," he says.

He singles out his song "Storm," which features rapper and singer Phoenix Pagliacci and writer George Elliott Clarke, from his 2022 Polaris-shortlisted album, Tao. On its surface, the lyrics are clearly related to climate, but are also connected to "what's really at the bottom," he says: "greed and shortsightedness and selfishness."

For Shad, climate action has been a very personal thing. He invests his money in places that don't support fossil fuels, for example, but is still figuring out what it looks like in his work. Shad says he's encouraged by what Music Declares Emergency is doing in the industry. "Not just to put the message out there as artists about what's happening, but also, to my understanding at least, to organize our industry, to be leaders … and I want to support that if I can."

'A revolutionary act'

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of what needs to be done for the climate. Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont., has long been held as a gold standard in Canada: its sustainable initiatives have been part of the festival's ethos for its 40-year history, and its list of measures is long and robust, including washing dishes onsite. Mariposa Folk Festival, which is held in Orillia, Ont., aspires to the Hillside model. 

Pam Carter, president of the Mariposa board for the last eight years and festival chair for the last 14, says environmental work has been part of their festival's mandate since 2009, including providing city water to festivalgoers, diverting waste and using compostable plates and utensils. But the festival is getting a green audit this year to step up what they're doing.

"We kind of plateaued, you know, for a variety of reasons," says Carter. One of the main issues they're looking at is transportation to the festival, as 52 per cent of festivalgoers come from more than than 40 kilometres away. "How do we get people to go to the festival in an environmentally responsible way?" 

"The biggest contributor to emissions in the live music sector is audience travel," says Fry. She says artists often think their own travel is the issue, but travel is complex when it involves a dedicated fanbase.

Larger festivals have more ground to cover. Sommo Festival, which is having its inaugural year this summer, is incorporating short- and long-distance shuttles to and from its location in remote Cavendish Beach, P.E.I., to Charlottetown and closer communities, as well as providing bike lockup to encourage cycling. The festival is put on by Whitecap Entertainment, which also runs the longstanding Cavendish Beach Music Festival, an event that has brought names including Taylor Swift to the island — along with an estimated 35,000 of her fans.

Taylor Jack, festival and entertainment manager for both festivals, says this year they'll be piloting water stations at Sommo, and they'll be getting a green audit to plan for the future, which they also hope to extend to Cavendish Beach Music Festival.

"It's important to us mainly because, one, we are an island. We got impacted by the hurricane … we lost a lot of our coastline during that time frame," Jack says. "Other little things that we can do to help sustain our island a little bit longer — we want to make that impact as much as we can."

Live Nation Entertainment, one of the largest multinational entertainment companies in the world with reported record profits earlier this year, launched an environmental charter in 2019 with a 2030 goal of eliminating single-use plastics, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent and becoming zero waste to landfill. As of this summer, the company states that it is still on target to meet those goals. Osheaga, which is considered to be Canada's largest arts and music festival with more than 100,000 attendees each year, has banned single-use plastics from food kiosks, and is piloting a project this year to "test the use of sorting stations (waste/recycling/returnables) in one area of the site (with a view to setting up stations throughout the site)," among other already established initiatives, according to a press release listing its sustainable development actions.

While Blond:ish's eco rider is proof that a lot of change can happen over a short time, the DJ is upfront about the challenges: "Organizers, they care about their bottom line at the end of the day — most of them. But then you have a small subset that are like us, and they don't mind, they have purpose over profit or some combination compromise of the two." 

Her one Canadian stop this summer will be for the popular electronic festival ÎleSoniq in Montreal, which has only adopted her no-plastic rule in the DJ booth, not at the festival overall, though it did ban plastic straws in 2018 and uses "reusable Ecocups" at concessions. "A big festival like that takes a lot more energy because we are dealing with the capitalistic stuff," she says.

Coming together and being celebratory and feeling joy and participating in collective, joyful experiences that we get through music is in and of itself a revolutionary act that is transformative."​​​​​​- Kim Fry

But there are other options. As a DJ who tours constantly, Blond:ish also feels the effect of flying on her carbon footprint. So through Bye Bye Plastic she partnered with DGTL Festival and Sky Energy to create a program called The Climate Gig, which helps you offset your commercial flights by funding and buying sustainable aviation fuel. Vinyl is also on Blond:ish's mind, and she's been working through her organization to develop a bacteria-based vinyl that can be mass produced within the current record-producing systems. "If it actually works well, it's going to be a part of history in the music industry."

"It really takes people that are inspired and motivated to change," Blond:ish adds.

It's one of the reasons Fry thinks the music festival setting is the perfect place to effect that change: "Coming together and being celebratory and feeling joy and participating in collective, joyful experiences that we get through music is in and of itself a revolutionary act that is transformative."