Live Music has a Waste Problem
And these 3 startups are fixing it without killing the vibe
Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽
Live Music has a Waste Problem
Quiz of the Week
Startup 1: Energy Floors
Startup 2: Greenlit
Startup 3: POWR2
Live Music has a Waste Problem
If you've ever screamed your lungs out at a concert, you know there's nothing quite like it.
The lights, the crowd, your favorite artist, a few hundred feet away — it’s the kind of joy that’s hard to put into words. But behind the scenes, that joy comes with a cost most of us never see.
One of the world’s biggest pop stars, Billie Eilish, saw it. And she decided to do something about it.
Her recent 14-month Hit Me Hard and Soft tour spanned 15 countries and four continents, and it’s quietly become a blueprint for what touring can look like when artists actually care:
Reusable water bottles.
Merch made from recycled materials. ( I think this can be avoided altogether)
Plant-based food at venues (a hit in San Jose, where SAP Center kept the vegan menu after she left).
A Google Maps partnership to help fans get to shows on public transit - genius!
Signage at every stop reminds concertgoers that small choices add up.
The impact: over 103,000 water bottles kept out of landfills, 27 food drives, and millions raised for climate causes.
You can read the full impact report here.
It matters because concerts have a footprint. The average three-day festival churns out roughly 500 tons of CO₂, about 5 kg per attendee, per day. Idling buses, generators, and single-use everything add up to that number.
And some brands are helping artists and their teams reduce the impact of their concerts.
But before we discuss them, here’s the quiz of the week:
⌛ Time for the quiz of the week
Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉
Energy Floors
Energy Floors, a Dutch startup, is turning something as ordinary as a dance step into clean energy. They design smart, interactive flooring for events, retail spaces, and mobility hubs. These floors quietly convert movement into electricity, data, and a visible reminder that sustainability can also be a little bit fun.
Their flagship product is the Kinetic Dancefloor, and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Every jump, sway, and stomp from the crowd gets converted into electricity in real time, powering the floor’s own LED lights or any of its on-site add-ons.
It has already shown up in some pretty iconic places, from the World Science Festival in Times Square to the European Jaguar XE launch party, turning sustainability from a talking point into something a crowd can literally feel under their feet.
Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour, where the band set out to cut greenhouse gas emissions, also used them. Energy Floors built custom Energy Centres at each venue: 44 kinetic dancefloor tiles arranged in a circle, plus 15 stationary bikes, so fans could dance and pedal their way into powering the show.
The tiles, topped with recycled plastic to survive a four-year world tour, also gathered data on how much energy is being produced. On the in-venue and online dashboards, fans could see which song generated the most power.
Greenlit
Greenlit, an India-based startup, is taking on the unglamorous side of live music: the generators, the plastic, the waste, the logistics. They offer end-to-end sustainability services for concerts and festivals, quietly handling the parts of a show that audiences never see, so the parts they come for can carry on with a much lighter footprint.
Their work starts long before the lights come on.
Greenlit runs a detailed carbon and waste audit to map an event’s emission sources and waste points, then designs a custom strategy covering packaging, power, hydration, and logistics.
On show day, their team manages the on-ground execution which involves setting up hydration stations, waste zones, and clean power systems behind the scenes.
Once the crowd has gone home, they deliver an impact report that quantifies emissions avoided and waste diverted, turning sustainability claims into something measurable.
The pieces themselves are practical and built for scale.
Diesel generators get swapped for silent, zero-emission battery energy storage systems that keep stages powered without the noise or the fumes.
Single-use plastics are replaced with reusable cups, cutlery, and artist-catering packaging.
Hydration stations and, more recently, branded water carts, keep crowds refilled without a mountain of bottles.
On the logistics side, EVs, smarter route planning, and shared transport networks move artists, equipment, and crew with a fraction of the usual fuel.
Their work has already shown up behind some of the biggest tours to land in India, including shows by Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran.
POWR2
POWR2, a US-based clean energy startup, is rethinking the loudest, smelliest part of any live show: the generator. They build hybrid power systems that pair battery energy storage with a backup generator in a single trailered unit, giving events, concerts, and festivals a way to keep the lights, lasers, and subwoofers on without the constant rumble of diesel running through the night.
At the heart of it is the POWRBANK Hybrid System, which uses the battery as the primary power source and only fires up the generator when it’s needed.
That alone is enough to cut fuel use, slash emissions by up to 80%, and bring the noise floor of a backstage area down to something close to quiet.
The whole setup is managed through their built-in ADVANTAGE energy management system, which lets crews monitor and control the generator, battery, and connected loads remotely, in real time, from anywhere.
It also means far less maintenance than traditional generators demand: no oil changes mid-show, no refueling runs between sets.
The result is a main stage powered without the usual fuel burn, the usual maintenance, or the usual noise. It set a new benchmark for sustainability at festival scale, and shows that clean power doesn’t have to mean compromised power.
Quiz answer: Taylor Swift
Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)