Greening a 3-Day, Multi-Stage Music Festival | S5 E8
Kate Johnston, Executive Director of Hillside Festival, joins Earth Care for episode 8 of the Sustainability in the Live Music Industry Series.
Hillside Festival is an eco-friendly festival located in Guelph, Ontario that has been celebrating music and community for over 40 years. Their Mission Statement reads, the Hillside Community Festival is a not-for-profit music festival that celebrates creativity through artistic expression, community engagement and environmental leadership.
Their story begins on July 14th, 1980, when they kicked off at Riverside Park Bandshell in Guelph with free admission, optional donation fee. The event was 11 hours of music for all ages.
From day one, Hillside Festival has made a strong commitment to ensure the environment is top priority. Fast forward to present day, they’re now a three day, multi-stage festival with a broad artistic vision that emphasizes diversity: of culture, of musical heritage and style, age, geography and influence.
They also have several green accolades under their belt. In 2014, they received the Honour Roll award from the Grand River Conservation Authority. In 2016, they won Best Green Operations awarded by Canadian Music Week. In 2019, the team received the International Clearwater Award for leadership in environmental sustainability. Additionally, for 8 years in a row, they were awarded Best Greening of a Festival from Festival and Events Ontario. They’re renowned as one of Canada’s most progressive, environmentally conscious, non-commercial community celebrations.
Kate Johnston, executive director of Hillside Festival, discusses the sustainability initiatives implemented at Hillside Festival. The conversation covers various topics, including transportation, food waste reduction, solar power integration, the green living roof, projects for artists, and advice for festival fans.
Hillside Festival is on from July 19-21, 2024.
Transcript:
Sarah Christie
Kate Johnston, Executive Director of Hillside Festival. Thank you so much for being on Earth Care and joining the sustainability and the live music industry series. It's such a pleasure to have you on here to really spotlight everything that is amazing about Hillside Festival because, okay, if you go and look at the website and go through the history, it's almost unprecedented, Everything that's been in place since the 80s.
So some of the things that caught my attention as I was reading through the history, for decades you've been using solar power, you've had sustainable merch. These are things that seem like new conversations now in 2024. So I'm wondering, how has Hillside made this doable? What is it about Hillside that you've managed to perfect something that seems so new and foreign to us now in 2024?
Kate Johnston
That's a great question. And I really, you know, Hillside is celebrating its 41st festival this year. So for over 40 years of people working together to make this happen, I really think there's nothing, you know, crazy or innovative or, you know, especially strange about the projects that decades of Hillside volunteers and staff have worked on. I really just think it's a labour of love. It's something that was so important to the people who founded Hillside in the 1980s. And it's been important every decade since. And so absolutely every sort of green element of Hillside that we're now starting to see more and more uptake, other festivals taking up, you know, water management systems and dishwashing and trash management. I really just think that they were just questions that people came to with a positive attitude of, you know, how can we solve this problem together rather than thinking of, you know, that this is insurmountable or this is something that we're not gonna be able to solve. So absolutely everything that you've mentioned, such as our solar powered water heater, every single project that we have has just been the product of ingenuity and passion and love of decades of volunteers. And we feel so proud of the past work and want to continue to bring that forward as we go forward into the future.
Sarah Christie
Yeah, how can you not? And hearing you speak about it, it's almost like, why isn't everyone, every business functioning like that? It's the, why not? Why not try mentality? So I wonder if we can essentially go on a conversational tour through all of the sustainability initiatives that are in place at Hillside, starting with the transportation side, because we know that transportation to concerts, let alone festivals, has a big impact. So what has Hillside done to work on reducing the impact of transportation.
Kate Johnston
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we really think of it, you know, it starts way far beyond from when you actually get to the festival site. As we know, it's about getting there and that's sort of becoming more part of our conversations these days about carbon emissions and transportation. You know, we do allow cars to access our festival site, but you know, we really encourage people to carpool and take buses. We offer a free shuttle bus that during the festival weekend, it runs continually between Downtown Guelph and our festival site, which of course is about 10 minutes outside of Guelph in the conservation area. We also partner with lots of local organizations on tons of different projects, but for example, we offer an organized bike ride that takes place from the city out to the conservation area. So, you know, many folks take their bikes and use active transportation when they're coming out to the festival, and there's sort of a group activity you can take part in, feeling a little bit more safe on that, sort of that highway that you need to access the festival site. So those are just some of the aspects of us, trying to green that transportation to the festival. We are also engaged in these conversations with our partners in every aspect of this today. I think that artists now, especially through COVID, are really starting to talk about that more. So we are part of those conversations about how artists can green their own transportation. And that has impacts on us when it comes to thinking about you know, the radius clauses that festivals put on artists, you know, should we be insisting on these huge spaces between artists and their gigs? You know, can we allow a little bit more of sort of close proximity of playing, which will allow for sort of less carbon intensive travel? So those are the conversations we're having right now. So we're still, of course, a work in progress.
Sarah Christie
Interesting. And you know, that's such an important piece of information that you just hit on the radius clause, because that isn't something I think anyone outside of the industry would understand what that is. So just from my understanding, that's, you know, you're going to only be booking guests or performers within a certain, you know, distance from the festival, if I'm understanding that correctly.
Kate Johnston
Absolutely, yes. It's something that's pretty common in large festivals and large venues. You might book a certain artist and written right into their contract might be like that they can't play within a six -month time period, they can't play within, say, 300 kilometers. And I think this is pretty standard and you can completely see where this came about. You want to have artists that are unique to your event and will draw people and you don't want the festival that is half an hour down the road next weekend presenting the same artist. You know, that completely makes sense from a marketing perspective. But I think it's something that all festivals and venues are realizing that we're going to have to start to talk about this. I think the movement is called Slow Touring, you know, allowing artists to book more performances in a smaller geographic area, which will just cut down on the carbon emissions, of course, of their travel.
Sarah Christie
Yeah, and I think it's really important to articulate that and talk about it, you know, outside for fans to know about that. Because when you go and you look at festival lineups, you're essentially supporting local, you're supporting home, you know, and it's just it's it's building a deeper connection with the people who are there and performing. So that is one aspect of the transportation…
Kate Johnston
Yeah, so we've kind of jumped right from before you get to the festival and now already to conversations that are happening today. So I've already jumped around the timeline.
Sarah Christie
That's the thing though, if you look at the website and if you've been to the festival, you know, like, there are just layers upon layers to talk about. So, okay, so transportation and now what about the food aspect? Because if you picture a festival, I can see, I can see the overflowing bins, I can see the pizza slices that are in the recycling bin contaminating. So what's in place at Hillside to reduce food waste and slow all of that down?
Kate Johnston
Again, this is something that we're really proud of and is absolutely, I just want to emphasize such a labor of love and sorry, my dog is getting upset that I'm talking to the screen here. Passionate about sustainability, definitely. Yeah, we're so proud of this process at Hillside. So there's a couple of different elements here. First is that we absolutely have no single use dishware of any kind available on site. So this took an investment, this took an investment of purchasing, reusable cutlery, dishes, cups, spoons, forks, everything, you know, and like, and that's something that Hillside invested in. We own that. This is dishes that we store over every year and we use them every year. So our food vendors, when we're selecting them, we ensure that they're aware that they need to use our equipment. You know, they need to prepare their food in such a way that it is proportioned appropriately for the plates that we have. Their drinks need to fit into the cups that we have. And so that's a huge part of the experience. Everything gets served to you on a plate in a reusable cup and you can take it with you anywhere throughout the festival.
We collect garbage, we collect recycling, and we collect compost. And we have a super dedicated volunteer crew. We have 1 ,300 volunteers every year at Hillside. And a really dedicated component of this is our waste management crew. They're super into it. They have so much fun. They make it a competition. So they're monitoring all of these trash turnarounds. They're assisting with the separation of all of those materials. And then we do have waste management, recycling, and compost available on site.
So we have our waste recycling and compost that gets taken to their appropriate places. Used dishes go to our dishwashing area where we have 100 and more volunteers doing on -site dishwashing. Items get washed and dried and taken right back into the food vending areas for reuse. So it's at its peak. It's quite an impressive system and amazing to see.
Sarah Christie
So if we've moved on from food, you touched on it earlier off the top of the interview, but how has solar power been integrated throughout the years into the festival?
Kate Johnston
Yeah, we use it in a couple of different ways. the key way is that, and again, this is through ingenuity of our volunteer base, you know, the expertise that we have built up over decades of people who really care about our event. You know, we have a solar powered water heater. So all the hot water that is used in the dishwashing area is heated by solar power. So that's something that is set up every year. We have educational panels and you can sort of see it in action at the festival. We have a number of solar powered charging stations,
We of course are in that conversation about should you have your phone, should you not have your phone at live music events? But you know, we make use of, we've gotten rid of our paper program. All of our festival information is posted on an app. So of course we do want you to have a device to have a phone. So there is solar powered phone charging available throughout the site, a number of different sort of spaces in different areas. we make use of it to provide a lot of lighting because of course we are in a conservation area. It does have services at certain points, but of course, as you can imagine, a large festival that spreads out, you know, we're not always connected to like a utility, like electrical service. So we do provide solar powered lighting for some of our sort of further spread parts of the festival. But also we're lucky because, you know, being part of the Guelph Lake Conservation Area, all of the electricity that we do use as part of the grid is green. It's generated from the Guelph Dam that's the structure that actually created the lake in the first place. So again, I want to emphasize how much of our efforts are the result of dedication and ingenuity, but also just good fortune to be in a beautiful place where we are, where we have access to those greener and more renewable sources of energy.
Sarah Christie
I just love Guelph. Guelph is such a leading trailblazing community. And this is such a reflection of that for anyone listening that isn't in Ontario. Guelph is just at the top of the list in terms of green innovation and conservation, in my opinion. And, you know, speaking with people who are from Guelph, they tend to echo that. Now, speaking of green, what about the green living roof? How does that work?
Kate Johnston
Yes, absolutely. So we were so thrilled to be able to participate with the conservation area in constructing a permanent stage. I know that it happened in the mid -2000s, I want to say about 2005. So this was a huge project, a huge fundraising effort on behalf of the community to construct the main stage. So, you know, if you're on our website and you see, you know, the permanent, you know, arched roof, you know, that's the structure I'm talking about. And so, and we installed a green living roof on top of that.
And we had a huge fundraising concert, actually, the Barenaked Ladies performed in order to help us raise funds for this. And so I really encourage everyone to check out some drone footage because it's a beautiful space up there, this living roof on top of our stage. And of course, it has some sort of strategic planting that makes a bit of a design in Hillside's logo. So we love to see that. We love to see that in any drone footage that we get that's sort of aerial of the festival site.
Sarah Christie
And you have a lot of projects in place also to help the artists and articulate, you know, things that they're passionate about. What are some of the projects, not necessarily at the festival, but on your website, you know, Hillside, that are available for, you know, some of the songwriting, some of the spoken word and yeah, all of the projects in place.
Kate Johnston
Yeah, I mean, we have five different stages at the festival, we have sort of our three main performance stages. But yeah, we do have a sun stage that features more spoken word, theatre, comedy, poetry, you know, anything sort of in the more in that genre. And of course, we have sort of a dedicated rainbow stage, which is our stage for children's performances as well. what we really love is when we can have an artist come to Hillside and they can participate in these different areas, you know, they might perform on that big one of the big main performance stages, but then they might also perform in a session or a workshop with other artists. They might go into the kids area and perform something for the kids and the families of the festival. We have a very important and authentic Indigenous Circle, which is an important part of Hillside, that is a place for education and community, and everyone is welcome to go there. And a number of artists will also come into the Indigenous Circle and provide performances or workshops or conversations there.
That's when I really think you see the artists that we invite get embedded in sort of the community feeling and the culture of Hillside. And that's what I think brings people back year after year.
Sarah Christie
So as we gear up for festival season, do you have any advice for fans as they start packing their bags to go to a festival to just be a bit more mindful about their impact and still, you know, enjoy music, enjoy the community because that's the word that keeps coming to mind as we're having this conversation, community. That's really what Hillside feels like. So what's your advice for the fan aspect?
Kate Johnston
I think as we're coming out now more and more from COVID, you know, and, you know, having those experiences again that we had to miss for multiple years, like the experiences of being together to experience music and, you know, being together in a site, you know, enjoying the physical beauty and the artistic beauty of what you're experiencing. I think, I think that just fans should be grateful for those opportunities. I think that it's...
It's because of fans that the organizations like music festivals can still survive. But I just think there's always an opportunity in everything that you're doing to think about the impact that you have. Say if you're a fan and you're going to travel to a weekend music festival, think about what can you bring with you that is reusable so that you can make sure that you can have water with you at all times. You don't need to buy a bottle of water. What is some other reusable stuff that you can have? Is there other things that you might buy and throw away during the weekend that you can replace with something else. Just those sort of small decisions is what will make a bigger impact in the end.
Sarah Christie
Kate Johnston, it was such a pleasure to have you on Earth Care. This conversation could probably go on for an hour because I just have so many questions and I'm just so amazed and I'm excited for the future of festivals because if, Hillside has been able to do this since the 80s, surely other festivals can latch on and, you know, start implementing this as well. So thank you so much.
Kate Johnston
No, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been great.
FINISHED.
