written by Green Mountain Energy

Music festivals may not be the first place you think about reducing your carbon footprint, but C3 Presents and Green Mountain Energy Company are working together to change that. The Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits music festivals, both produced by C3 Presents, bring together hordes of music lovers with substantial carbon footprints from traveling to the three-day festivals. Green Mountain helps balance out that environmental impact by offering the Green Mountain Energy® Fan Tag, a quick and easy way for attendees to ‘green up’ their festival travel by purchasing Climate Action Reserve certified carbon offsets.

This year, Green Mountain Energy Fan Tag sales supported landfill methane capture projects located in the same region as each festival. Austin City Limits Fan Tag sales went toward the SouthTex Greenwood Farms project in Taylor, Texas, while Lollapalooza Fan Tag sales supported the Central Sanitary project in Pierson, Michigan. Both projects are certified by the Climate Action Reserve, helping assure fans that their Fan Tag purchase is backed up by high quality emissions reductions. More than 2,300 Fan Tags were sold in 2011, helping offset over 500,000 pounds of CO2 emissions. Over the five year partnership between C3 Presents and Green Mountain, nearly 17,000 Fan Tags have been sold, resulting in over 16.7 million pounds of CO2 emissions balanced out by fans!

The Green Mountain Energy Fan Tag program has been an integral part of greening up the festival experience for attendees, but C3 Presents has gone even further by committing to offset 100% of the carbon footprint of each festival, along with its own Austin, TX, office operations. For the first time ever, this impressive commitment was expanded in 2011 to include offsetting artist travel to and from the festivals. Green Mountain provided carbon footprint calculation services, procured high quality renewable energy certificates and CAR certified carbon offsets, offered marketing guidelines for C3’s environmental purchases and helped promote and sell the Fan Tags.

Together, C3 Presents and Green Mountain have helped spread awareness among fans about their carbon footprint, while making the festivals a little bit greener.

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Would you like to be featured in the Reserve newsletter and earn a free reusable Reserve water bottle? Each monthly newsletter, the Reserve will showcase an individual or organization who has retired CRTs to offset their emissions. To submit an entry, please share a few paragraphs (up to 350 words) about you and your decision to offset. Photos are welcome! Featured submissions in the newsletter will earn water bottles, and all submitted entries will be posted on the Reserve web blog. Email your entries to: [email protected].

This is an excellent opportunity to highlight your environmental stewardship and advancement of climate solutions. This is also an excellent opportunity to raise awareness of outstanding GHG reduction projects.