As we all finish up our packing for Telluride, here’s a short video of what we were able to accomplish at last year’s Festival. In just a week, we’ll be writing the next chapter in the (video) book of sustainable festivation.
Jambase.com, one of our favorite live music websites, has done an admirable job of covering the environmental sustainability issues facing the music industry through their extremely thoughtful and insightful GreenBase blog. Since April 18, 2007, the blog’s team of writers have been covering (and uncovering) the news, trends, and realities of our industry. As they have consistently proven to unafraid of calling out “greenwashing” even among the major music festivals, they serve as a much-needed watchdog in our music industry / environmental sustainability world.
So it was an honor for us to be the feature of an extensive interview and profile last week - “The Greening of Bluegrass: An Interview with Telluride’s Steve Szymanski. Give their piece a read (along with these two earlier pieces) and share your thoughts either here or over on the GreenBase blog.
And in the spirit of Greenbase writer, Jason Turgeon, who often ends his posts with a YouTube clip, here’s one of the acts we’re looking forward to at this year’s Telluride Bluegrass (their only show of 2008!)…
Today’s episode of Marketplace includes an interview with Elizabeth Royte, the author of the new book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. The book is an investigative look at the bottled water industry and how they marketed their way to becoming an 11 billion dollar industry. From the Marketplace interview…
It took off because of very clever marketing that prayed on our ideas about health and wellness and beauty and weight loss and things like that and we were told that we needed to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and drink 8 ounce glasses a day and so portability became really important and that marketing worked really, really well. It turned bottled water from a $150 million a year industry in 1990 to a $11.5 billion a year industry in 2007.
Elizabeth goes on to talk a little about the differences between tap water and bottled water…
“I think people really don’t know anything about where their water comes from. People don’t know whether they’re drinking groundwater or surface water, they don’t know what’s in their watershed and they just have a lot of questions about it and they don’t go and find out what’s in there and it’s really easy to find…”
As we prepared to mount our “drink local” campaign at Telluride Bluegrass, we talked with Telluride’s water treatment plant superintendent, Bill Goldsworthy. It turns out the town’s water comes directly from two sources: one that begins above treeline high up in the Mill Creek Basin north of town, where it is collected out of Mill Creek into a small settling pond at 9,600 feet on a ridge just north of the Shell Station on the valley floor. The other source begins at 11,600 feet at the top of Coronet Creek, which feeds the Still Well reservoir, located at 9,500 feet near the Jud Wiebe Trail just off of Tomboy Road. From these two tributaries, it’s a short journey to the treatment plant just west of town, where it is treated and then stored in two 250,000 gallon tanks off of Tomboy Road.
Though both sources require chlorine treatment by federal law, at the Festival we’ll be filtering out the chlorine along with other particles. Our specially-designed filter stations utilize a pair of reasonably-priced commercial filters to assure that the tap tastes even better than the bottle. The filters will be easily visible, along with a water meter, so everyone knows exactly what we’re doing to the water. And so everyone can monitor the scope of this change (using the water meter) away from bottled water.
