Are You Crazy?!

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Ultimately, it's about change management and I believe the lessons are transferrable.

It Began at a Music Festival

For those attending the Calgary Folk Music Festival kicking off this week, you'll appreciate that my journey began at this charming family-friendly community event 15 years ago. Starting in 2008, I served as the Folk Festival’s Environment Manager and then member of the Board of Directors over a seven-year period.

During my tenure, I brought the idea forward to ban single use water bottles from the Calgary Folk Music Festival and was met with this question:

“Are You Crazy?!”

Actually the full reaction was:

“You're going to dehydrate the audience with your reckless plan, but you’re really crazy if you think we can deny water bottles to performers! These are people who can’t even remember where they put their guitars, much less a reusable bottle of water?”

I would soon learn an important lesson about change management: uncover the area of greatest resistance, start there, co-create solutions, and reinforce.

Uncover the Resistance

While a small but mighty team of paid staff lead the Calgary Folk Music Festival year-round, the Festival is largely executed by more than 1200 dedicated volunteers who clean the site, provide security, serve the beer, and manage sound and power at each of the seven stages on site.

Volunteer managers have a lot of influence in the planning and execution of the Calgary Folk Festival and some of them have been in their role for decades. They knew the event logistics inside and out and some of them placed an oversized emphasis on their identity as an authority within their area of the festival. That was especially true for those responsible for sound. That is understandable I suppose. After all, who wants to go to a music-less music festival?

It was the Stages Managers, from whom I received the “are you crazy?!” reaction. They wanted an exemption from the bottled water phase out. I told them it would send the wrong message if plastic water bottles were available but only to performers. “We should go all the way or not at all,” I said. One stages team member posed the following scenario:

“Say one of the artists knocks over the bottles and shorts out the sound equipment? It would cut the sound for the whole festival.” However, this was no more plausible than the current situation, where unsealed half drunken plastic water bottles already litter the stage. Because they were long-time volunteers and experienced musicians themselves, I asked them; “how was live music performed before the days we were inundated with water bottles?” They could not remember and in fairness, most of us can’t.

Bottled Water is a Scam

Bottled water is so prolific and it's staggering to think that more people in North America drink bottled water than milk or beer - approximately 42.6 billion bottles each year. The average American drinks more than 30 gallons of bottled water in a year. At an average price of $1.50 per bottle that is close to US$300 a year spent by almost every American on something that comes out of the tap for free.

I never really understood the mass appeal of bottled water. So much of it is just municipal tap water that's filtered, packaged, and sold back to us with a markup of nearly 300,000 percent. That's in addition to the tax dollars we're paying to subsidize the infrastructure that large soft drink makers are incentivized to exploit through volume discounts.

Having spent time in developing countries where access to safe, potable water is unaffordable and out of reach for millions of people, I struggle with the ethics of commoditizing something required for basic survival and feel concerned that water is now openly traded on some stock exchanges along with gold and consumer goods.

It's an Environmental Catastrophe

The carbon footprint of a bottle of water is really high when you consider the impact of shipping, distribution, manufacturing of each single use plastic bottle. If you were to fill one quarter of a plastic water bottle with oil, that's roughly the amount needed to make the bottle.

According to the United Nations, at least 800 species worldwide are affected by marine debris, and as much as 80 percent of that litter is plastic. It’s estimated that up to 13 million metric tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year—the equivalent of a rubbish or garbage truck loads worth every minute. Only 9 percent of the planet’s total plastics have ever been recycled.

It's a Human Health Emergency

The problem has become so dire that microplastic pollution now shows up in the food we eat, water we drink and air we breathe. It’s been found in the feces of babies and adults and in 2022, microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time, with scientists finding the tiny particles in almost 80 percent of the people tested. Half the samples contained polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, which is commonly used in drink bottles.

As a result, plastics have now been classified under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act as a “toxic substance” and there are proposed amendments to the Act, which would prohibit the export of plastics as a means of disposal.

We Can't Wait

Maybe we're all waiting for government regulations to catch up to the scale of the problem or perhaps we trust global bottled water brands to innovate their way towards a solution. After all, early indications suggest that single use water bottles may one day be made with plant based rather than petroleum-based plastics. That might be a fine solution if they are composted properly in a commercial facility using the latest technology, otherwise decomposing plant-based plastic releases methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. So that's not a solution to hold one’s breath for.

Move in Stages

It became very clear that in order to successfully eliminate bottled water from the Calgary Folk Music Festival, I would need to earn the trust and support of the stages crew. So I worked closely with them over several months to address their concerns, which I found to be very reasonable once we talked them through. I realized that they mostly wanted to be heard and their deepest fears were actually not that the sound would be negatively affected but rather their relationships that they enjoy developing with the artists would be negatively affected by denying them water.

Pilot It

We agreed to co-create a focused pilot project to begin the bottled water phase-out focused first on the artists. It involved placing water refill stations at every stage area for performers only and had our teams share responsibility for regularly cleaning, sanitizing and replacing the large Culligan water jugs throughout the four days of the event. We agreed that if it did not work, we would abandon the plan entirely.

Make It Simple

One of the Festival sponsors - TD funded a large number of high quality reusable water bottles, which were branded with the loveable cow that was part of the Folk Festival’s vintage logo. They were distributed to musical performers as part of their welcome package and we had a plan in place to collect all the disused or half-drunk bottles for washing and redistribution, but we did not need it. In fact, the artists loved their reusable bottles so much they clipped them to their belts or bags and raved about them onstage.?

Look for Opportunities

One of the main headliners - Michael Franti announced from the stage that he would be taking his souvenir Calgary Folk Fest bottle on tour with him around the world. His announcement generated demand for the reusable bottles and audience members went into the merch tent looking to purchase their own. The pilot program was an unmitigated success and the stages team was unreserved in their support going forward.

Scale It

The following year, we rolled out the water program audience-wide. We hired a company called H2O Buggy to supply several large mobile water stations with built in filtration systems that could be wheeled in prefilled with potable water or set up in areas of the park where they could be plugged right into Municipal water systems underground. The H2O Buggies enabled audience members to access the equipment from either side with a series of taps to fill up reusable bottles or taps to drink from directly like a water fountain.?

Make It Memorable

Our water bottle sponsor expanded their support of the water program with one of the most innovative corporate sponsor activations I have ever been a part of. TD event staff filled up specialized backpacks using the H2O Buggies and then walked around the festival site offering to refill reusable water bottles for festival goers. Clean and safe potable water was made available for free on demand without lineups anywhere in the festival venue.

Tell the Story Effectively

It was incredibly well received by the public and the mainstream media and that year the Calgary Folk Music Festival was recognized with an international A Greener Festival Award (now known as A Greener Future ) alongside Bonaroo and many other well-known international music festivals.

Change the Sector

My experience at the Calgary Folk Music Festival was a rewarding opportunity to make a positive impact while listening to some great music, connecting with a diverse community, and further developing my leadership skills. It also like a living laboratory, which served as an incubator for my co-founders - Matt Dorma , Christopher Dunlap and I to launch our own social enterprise called DIG (Do It Green), which was our vehicle to bring the zero waste, net zero emissions and water-bottle free programs to many other events.

DIG eventually purchased the assets of H2O Buggy (later sold to Quench Buggy ) and rolled out the mobile water stations alongside other environmental services and displaced more than one million bottles of water at hundreds of events in western Canada over a seven year period.

Are You Crazy (Enough)?

Could your event also serve as an incubator for innovative new ideas and businesses that serve a future events industry that prioritizes social impact and solutions for the planet?

As you plan your next outdoor event, consider for a moment the impact of more than 70 percent of the plastic bottles from your venue spending the next 1000 years floating in the ocean and ask yourself: am I designing something with the future in mind?

Will eliminating bottled water from your events solve the world’s problems? Unlikely, but you will make a measurable positive impact, be recognized for your voluntary action, and effectively position yourself within an ecosystem of solution seekers and innovators shaping the future.

And if anybody asks you “are you crazy!?” tell them “I have been for supporting the status quo but I now see clearly where the future is going and I'm excited to collaborate with you to make it work and make it amazing.”

See You at Folk Fest

Give me a shout if you're planning to be at the Folk Music Festival in Calgary this week. I'd love to connect in person.

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Leor Rotchild was the Executive Director of Canadian Business for Social Responsibility (CBSR) and pioneer in the sustainable events industry. His forthcoming book "How We Gather Matters" will be available in early 2024 from New Society Publishers.

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