From buses to T-shirts, bands make concerted effort to go green

The band The Fray is known for chart-topping pop hits like "Over My Head (Cable Car)" and "How to Save a Life," but with its latest tour, which comes to the Tweeter Center tonight, it's adding environmental advocacy to its repertoire.

For its first amphitheater tour, The Fray is carbon offsetting by purchasing renewable energy credits to compensate for the power the band uses in concerts and the bus fuel it burns. The band is selling T-shirts made from organic cotton. Even the bags those T-shirts come in are good for the earth. "There's this company called Bio-Bag that makes a completely biodegradable corn plastic bag for all of our stuff," said guitarist Dave Welsh. Going green has become very rock 'n' roll.

A small but vocal group of musicians has been advocating such practices for years -- one pioneer is Willie Nelson, who has invested in his own biodiesel fuel brand, BioWillie -- but there has recently been a groundswell of acts opting to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Artists such as Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Sheryl Crow, Avril Lavigne, Jack Johnson, Linkin Park, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Norah Jones are making it clear that going green is becoming mandatory among the mainstream rock set.

"The event industry is the second-largest contributor to carbon emissions in the world, next to construction," said Joseph Malki, vice president of business development for green events consultant Seven-Star Inc., which will be overseeing the environmental efforts of four of the Live Earth concerts taking place around the world July 7.

Adam Gardner, guitarist-vocalist for the Boston-spawned band Guster, became so interested in finding ways to reduce his band's carbon footprint that he and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, both Tufts University graduates, began Reverb, a nonprofit green tour-consulting organization, in 2004.

Reverb does everything from offering suggestions to providing full-service consultants who will coordinate backstage recycling and biodiesel refueling for trucks and buses, set up "ecovillages" at venues, and more . The group has assisted the Chili Peppers, Lavigne, and Jones in the past, and is working with The Fray and Mayer this summer.

"I admire the approach Guster is taking," said Christine Geiger, 40, of Groveland, a longtime Guster fan. "There is no big sermon, lecture, or guilt trip leveled on the audience. Ryan [Miller, vocalist] doesn't get up there and spew philosophies. He encourages the audience to check out the stuff, and then they go back to rocking out . . . and that is a much better way to convert the masses."

Reverb's efforts even helped inspire Guster's record label, Warner Music Group, to examine its environmental profile. Many other labels, large and small, are following suit by reducing their use of paper-based marketing and by carbon offsetting their manufacturing practices.

Though in the past some artists have chosen to use environmentally friendly compact disc packaging, it's becoming so commonplace that a " Prince of Darkness, " Ozzy Osbourne, recently announced that the packaging for his new album, "Black Rain," is made from recycled paper. He didn't even include liner notes; fans are directed to look them up online.

Amy Ray of the folk-pop duo Indigo Girls said part of the reason bands are taking up the cause is the shame factor. "Bands know they can't sit there and talk about being socially conscious if they're not doing anything themselves on tour," she said by phone from a car dealership, where she was, coincidentally, getting her hybrid serviced.

But it's also gotten a lot easier to be green, she said; the movement has taken off nationally and green-oriented alternatives, from biodiesel stations to recycled plates and cups, have proliferated.

"People are jumping on the bandwagon because there are organizations that are willing to green your tour, and it makes it easier for [bands] to have an infrastructure that they can step into and use," said Ray.

Such a package deal was one reason Mayer, who has opined often on his blog about ecoissues, chose to go the green route this summer.

"Why wouldn't we do things to minimize pollution that really have no negative logistical effect?" said Mayer's manager, Michael McDonald.

From an emissions standpoint, these measures won't save the world, but for a 40-plus date tour like Mayer's, involving about a dozen buses and trucks, they are significant, according to Michelle Manion, climate and energy team leader for the nonprofit Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management.

"If you're talking about 12 diesel buses across the country for 40 days, that's actually not trivial," she said of the potential for emissions reduction. "If they really did a B100 carbon neutral fuel," a fuel that is 100 percent biomaterials, "that starts to add up."

For example, on Guster's 26-date "Campus Consciousness" tour last spring, the use of B20 prevented 14,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted, said Sullivan.

Some observers in the media have said that the musicians' environmental efforts still do not match their rhetoric. Sheryl Crow's recent "Stop Global Warming" tour was targeted for preaching conservation and personal sacrifice onstage while running a fleet of 13 vehicles.

"The point is . . . we're making efforts," said Mayer's manager, McDonald. "Where things break down is when people get into a fight about whether or not everyone's making enough of an effort."

For Ray, the complaints -- about private jets, biodiesel percentages, and the like -- just prove that the message is spreading. "You know it's starting to shift when people start pointing out all the problems."

Manion, for one, contends that the consciousness raising, more than the reduced emissions, will end up being the true impact of this movement. "Rock stars get way more attention than key legislators among certain age groups, so they're probably going to educate more people than a senator or congressman or wonky policy maker or bureaucrat."

Said The Fray's Welsh: "We have an opportunity to let 10,000 people know each night of a really important issue that everybody should be aware of. So let's do it."