Bonnaroo: Behind the Music, The Effort to Keep it Green // From the NY Times ArtsBeat

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Ben Sisario

MANCHESTER, Tenn. — At Bonnaroo, everything exists on a vast scale. The hundreds of acres of camping. The tens of thousands of sweaty bodies shoving against one another for a better view of the Kings of Leon. And, as at any big festival, the volume of trash, which overflows from bins and by the end of each night lies scattered, crushed and muddy throughout the grounds.

One of the more remarkable things about Bonnaroo is how it handles the waste. Since it began, in 2002, it has hired Clean Vibes, a company in North Carolina, to manage an extensive greening program, involving a network of about 500 volunteers, on-site composting and trash sorting, as well as incentives for fans to sort trash. Last year Clean Vibes — one of a handful of similar companies, which also handles the trash at festivals like Mountain Jam in upstate New York and Allgood in West Virginia — kept about a third of Bonnaroo’s 489 tons of waste from going in a landfill, according to its owner, Anna Borofsky.

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Also see this article about Bonnaroo's energy wave cresting.