New website for green fans launches

With audience travel making up a staggering 43% of all of the CO2 emitted by the UK's music industry - and with the audience at some "out of town" greenfield  festivals making up to 80% of  those festival's total greenhouse gas emissions , we felt it was time we tried to publicise what everyone can do to make their own lives a little bit more environmentally friendly. So we've teamed up with those good folks at Virtual Festivals (www.Virtualfestivals.com) to put up some webpages called My Greener Festival that give practical advice on getting greener - and reveal what some of the more enlightened festival organisers are already doing to make their events more sustainable. If you want clean and green festivals and if you have the time please take a look at the new pages at www.virtualfestivals.com/green .We are hoping that this new initiative, coupled with our Great Big Green Ideas competition which we launched with the Big Issue, Glastonbury and T-in-The-Park, means that festival organisers, crew, artists and fans can all participate in what is become an increasingly important battle against climate change. Enjoy - and if you haven't entered the competition then have a go - there is a really great first prize with lots of festival goodies from Lattitude, Leeds, Glastonbury, T-in-the-Park, The BRITS, The Futureheads and the Verve! You have till May 25th to email us your great big green ideas - to agreenerfestival@aol.com please.Over one million people enjoyed music festivals in the UK in 2008 and audience travel accounted for 68% of all greenhouse gas emissions - and 24% of the music audience travel. You can find out more about greenhouse gas emissions in the music industry by going to www.juliesbicycle.com - they have two excellent research papers - 'First Step' looking at the UK's music industry's emissions and the just published 'Jam Packed' which looks at audience travel. Its time we all took some responsibility for the planet.