Beyond the headliners, performers, food, and traffic that make Outside Lands a premier weekend series, it also comes with a lot of trash – and a system for dealing with it. Each piece is sorted twice.
The first time with volunteers instructing attendees, and the second time to correct any errors.
“Historically, we have really been on the front of sustainability,” said Annie Farman, the director of sustainability for Outside Lands. “We’re lucky to be in the city of San Francisco. People are pretty aware and they’re very conscious about our footprint on this planet.”
Farman said Outside Lands has the highest waste diversion rate of any large-scale festival in the United States – some at 89 percent of it ends up out of landfills, thanks to multiple initiatives and efforts from volunteers and staff.
As it has done in previous years, Outside Lands partnered with two waste management organizations to assist with the abundance of trash a three-day festival produces.
Clean Vibes, an on-site waste management organization for festivals and events has over 500 volunteer “trash talkers” who bus tables and inform attendees how to properly sort their trash. Volunteers are also ground sweepers clean up crews.
“A lot of these folks, I think, are less interested in the music and just really excited about the experience of being a part of the event in this capacity, helping with the sustainability,” said Anna Borofsky, the co-owner of Clean Vibes. While that’s a sentiment that could not be confirmed, there were an awful lot of volunteers walking the talk.
“You get to keep mother earth safe, and also watch all these amazing artists,” said volunteer Nathanael Beceriril Diaz, who, like other volunteers, got a free ticket all three days in exchange for 12 hours of volunteering.
He and others get ignored at times, he said, and trash is dumped into the wrong bag. “But then it’s on us to correct their mistakes and hope someone will care more the next time,” he said.
After trash is mitigated by Clean Vibes volunteers, each piece makes its way to the next group — the workers at Green Mary, an eco-friendly organization that specializes in waste management, eco-stations, dumpsters, and transportation.
The 16 Green Mary workers transport already sorted trash bags from the festival to an area they call “Middle Earth,” a secluded area in Golden Gate Park.
There, it is sorted again. Compost, wood, metals, textiles, and asphalt are just a few of the things they come across. Last year, Outside Lands kept 330,000 pounds of these materials out of landfills, according to Farman.
After the trash is sorted a second time and loaded into large shipping containers, the latter return to the Clean Vibes team. From there, the containers are hauled to their final destinations, whether it be a donation center for corks to be recycled to soles or a plastic film repurposing center.
“Having large gatherings like this, it’s both important that we make them as sustainable as possible, but also make it an opportunity to educate people,” Borofsky said. “If we can show them that in Golden Gate Park, in a sea of 75,000 people, we can divert almost all the waste — there’s no reason that they can’t take that and do that at home as well.”
Trash Lands