The music industry hasn’t been kind to the environment. A study in 2018 highlighted how music festivals used seven million tonnes of fuel, generated 25,800 tonnes of waste and had a carbon footprint of 24,261 tonnes in the UK alone. So, when the biggest band in the world, Coldplay, announced that they will embark on a sustainable world tour in 2022—which will have a solar-powered stage, kinetic energy power, and pedal power among other things—it came as a wake-up call for many. But are festivals in India ready to step on the road to sustainability, too?

“The time has definitely come for this [sustainability] idea and there is a lot of increased awareness about it,” says Divya Ravichandran, founder of Skrap, a social enterprise that works with events to ensure zero waste and attempts to make them as sustainable as possible. However, founders of India’s largest crowdfunded, DIY festival, Control ALT Delete (CAD), Nikhil Udupa and Himanshu Vaswani, believe that India hasn’t reached a stage where it can solar power an entire festival. “Neither is it possible to set up that kind of arrangement for one or two days. It is not very economically feasible to be environment conscious and sustainable.” However, that being said, even at CAD, they are trying to explore various avenues. All the decor at the festival is DIY and made from reusable, recyclable objects and material. They mentioned how printing hoardings and signages on flex cards is harmful because that material is not recyclable. “We use things made from produce found on land, such as discarded wooden planks, old paint cans or coconut husk as ashtrays. We even use barks of trees as our signages,” says Vaswani.