How Coldplay are making their new tour eco-friendly with a little push from their fans
It's hard to make a global music tour environmentally friendly, but Coldplay are putting in the effort. When the band announced their new tour to support their most recent album, Music of the Spheres, they made several environmental pledges and announced sustainability initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible.
Coldplay's efforts are based around three principles, according to their website: Reduce (as in, "reduce our consumption, recycle extensively and cut our CO2 emissions by 50 percent"), Reinvent ("support new green technologies and develop sustainable, super-low carbon touring methods"), and Restore ("make the tour as environmentally beneficial by funding a portfolio of nature- and technology-based projects and by drawing down significantly more CO2 than the tour produces").
The Associated Press was on the ground at Coldplay's recent tour stop in Glendale, Ariz., to see some of these new green technologies in action. Coldplay's concert setup now includes kinetic dance floors and stationary bikes that can channel energy directly from the fans in the crowd into batteries that power different elements of the show.
"You don't want to come across as being overly earnest. This stuff is really good fun as well," Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman told the AP's Mark Kennedy. "That's the way it will bed in, if people see it less as a sort of onerous responsibility and more as a kind of opportunity to do something fun."
If those efforts aren't enough, the band has also pledged to plant and protect millions of new trees — including one for every ticket sold.
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