Bernard Fanning, Killing Heidi and more want to stamp out plastic cups and bottles at music events

It seems like you’d barely find a single punter at a music festival who wasn’t either fiercely clutching a plastic bottle of water, or drunkenly sloshing a plastic cup’s worth of beer on you in the moshpit, and plastic cups have definitely become a fixture at pretty much any event you’ll go to.

They’re also hugely wasteful and bad for the environment, mind you, and it’s hard not to feel a pang of guilt as you pack up your tent on the final day and gaze around at the genuine environmental disaster left behind. If a few Aussie musicians have their way though, we might just be able to change that.

Green Music Australia is an initiative hoping to rid Aussie music events of unnecessary plastic water bottles and cups and, as Music Feeds reports, they have been pushing festivals like Groovin The Moo to do away with them this year. Now, names like Bernard Fanning, Killing Heidi, Ball Park Music, All Our Exes Live In Texas, Missy Higgins and Paul Kelly have signed up to push the next campaign, ‘Plastic Free July’.

All of the acts will now be committing to not only doing away with plastic water bottles onstage, but also knocking plastic out of their backstage pre-drinks – whether that means we’ll just see Paul Kelly necking whiskey straight from the bottle instead, they don’t say.

“Killing Heidi and I are stoked to make a move towards more sustainable touring,” Killing Heidi frontwoman Ella Hooper says, pointing out to a move towards more sustainable options is “the way of the future”.

“I encourage all my mates in bands to follow suit and check out Green Music to find out how,” she added. “Getting rid of single use is the way of the future and we’re so happy to be involved.”

Some music festivals are already way ahead of the game in terms of making their events environmentally sustainable, including the sustainably-minded Caloundra Festival, whose elimination of plastic bottles saved 60,000 of the buggers in the last few years alone, along with a range of other smart environmental solutions to waste.

Any musos or music-lovers who want to get on board with the campaign and push this sort of change through faster can get involved here.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.