Organizers of the various music festivals around the country like to promote their specific festival as unique when compare to the others. However, there exists one common thread among these festivals: actions that are environmentally friendly.

In trying to maintain a unique status, each festival does something different towards being environmentally friendly. For example, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, along with California, offered their Carpoolchella initiative for years.  Any concertgoers who show up in a car with at least four passengers are given a sign for their car, which identifies the occupant as environmentally friendly.  Additionally, the cars occupants are automatically entered into a drawing for VIP privileges – for life!

Lollapalooza in Chicago, Illinois, has been dedicating one section of their festival known as “Green Street” and continues to add to it every year. On this street, concertgoers can deliver garbage bags full of trash and receive a concert t-shirt – made purely out of bamboo.

Outside Lands, in San Francisco, has for years been perhaps America’s most environmentally friendly festival running solely on Solar Power. Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tennessee has won an award for being so good to the environment.

It is time for Bandemonium, which is the music festival run here at Pascack Hills, to jump on the environmentally friendly bandwagon. Like any initiative developed towards saving our planet, it is wise to start small so as to ensure success. I believe I have come up with a viable idea: electronic ticketing. With the growing popularity of smart phones in our school, we can seriously decrease the amount of paper we use. You know how they always say “There’s an app for that.” Well, there is an app that can scan tickets as people walk into events. Amtrak travelers use the E-ticket scanner app on their phones. Those checking tickets also use their phones to process customers riding their trains. We could use a similar system. Our festivalgoers could purchase their tickets on their iPhones. Like Amtrak, our workers at the door could verify those tickets purchase using their iPhones as well. We could also use smart phone applications to save paper in our pre-event advertising and the day-of-event voting.

Again, this idea can happen because it is small compared to what some of those larger music festivals do, but it is indeed an initiative that will take a step towards helping our planet.