On a federal policy level, 2025 was a nightmare year for the environment. The Trump administration’s proposals have included the rollback of protections on millions of acres of wetlands and streams; the allowance of new oil and gas drilling across 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters; the pausing of the expansion of clean energy infrastructure; withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord for the second time; and more.
Meanwhile, many people watched in horror — or lived the horror in real time — as climate change-related disasters ravaged communities across the country. The Los Angeles wildfires in January decimated entire neighborhoods, including the homes of many in the city’s music community. In July, severe flooding in central Texas killed more than 130 people, while October’s Hurricane Melissa killed over 100 people in the Caribbean.
It’s been altogether difficult to witness, although simply witnessing it all isn’t necessarily the point. As Support + Feed founder Maggie Baird, one of the music industry’s leading environmental advocates and Billie Eilish’s mom, told Billboard in October while quoting Joan Baez, “Action is the antidote to despair.”
To that end, many in the music industry took matters into their own hands this year by leveling up their sustainability efforts across touring, merchandise, waste management and more, with more artists, companies and organizations coming together to work on problems collaboratively.
“The main thing I would say about this time is that it’s a moment for radical collaboration,” Baird continued in October. “Every organization I know and work with, we’re just like, ‘How can we be better together?’ We have to multiply — exponentially.”
These are the five biggest music sustainability stories of 2025.
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Merch Gets Greener
In partnership with a collection of clothing companies, artists including Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan took steps to make their merch better for the environment, and thus better for their fans, too.
Roan’s team switched the materials for her signature camouflage trucker hat from 100% polyester to a 50% polyester/50% cotton blend, and her team is exploring an upcycling plan that would work with vintage clothing brand Beyond Retro to sell vintage items at Roan’s concerts. Eilish pulled a similar move with merch for her Hit Me Hard and Soft world tour, partnering with clothing brand Suay to take hundreds of dead-stock work shirts, add sleeves and embroider “Billie” on each piece, with some of Eilish’s old merch also repurposed into bags. Baird told Billboard that these “upcycled items sold out so fast, because there were limited quantities and they were extremely unique, and unique to Billie.”
Baird also worked with artist merchandising company Bravado, a merchandising and branding division of UMG, on an initiative that sent 400,000 obsolete and unsold tour t-shirts and other unused merch from a warehouse in Nashville to a facility in Morocco, where these items were transformed into yarn by textile manufacturer Hallotex. Shipped across the ocean by boat to save on carbon emissions, this new yarn will be used to make 100% recycled blank cotton t-shirt blanks for Bravado in Europe and the surrounding region. Speaking at Billboard’s Live Music Summit in November, Baird also discussed how Eilish’s team and Bravado are experimenting with new cutting patterns for merch items to reduce fabric waste.
All in all, these projects are creating a pattern for the rest of the industry to design itself after.
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Artists Get Vocal
In terms of artists who make sustainability part of their public-facing brands and work, Eilish, FINNEAS, Coldplay, Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson are often among the loudest and most active. This year, though, a crew of other acts stepped into the spotlight to talk about ways to protect the planet.
“Please google how much energy and pollution it takes to run Ai,” SZA wrote on social media in July about the massive environmental toll of the technology, particularly in the places where AI data centers are being built. (These centers require massive amounts of energy and water, with Forbes reporting in March that “the water consumption associated with a single conversation with ChatGPT was comparable to the amount contained by a standard plastic water bottle.”)
“Please google the beautiful black cities like Memphis that are SUFFERING because of twitters new Ai system” SZA continued. “PLEASE JUST GOOGLE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM. AI doesn’t give a f–k if you live or die I promise. THERE IS A PRICE FOR CONVENIENCE AND BLACK AND BROWN [people] WILL PAY THE BRUNT OF IT EVERY-TIME.”
Meanwhile, Masta Killa partnered with PETA to promote the benefits of a plant-based diet, which the Wu-Tang Clan member has adhered to for more than 20 years. The artist told Billboard about the health benefits of plant-based eating, and in previous interviews has said that beyond these health benefits, eating only plants is “actually better for the planet. I honestly think that you are what you eat. If I’m making a piece of meat, pumped up with steroids from an animal — I’m ingesting his blood. How is that good for me?”
(On this front, Eilish and her team partnered with every venue on her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour to ensure that vendors sold at least one plant-based meal during shows, with the team also offering training to venue food service staff on how to prepare these dishes, along with their financial and health benefits.)
Additionally, Northern Irish electronic duo Bicep worked on Takkuuk, an audiovisual installation by the duo along with visual artist Zak Norman and filmmaker Charlie Miller. Through music and video, the film delves into the lives, communities and challenges facing artists indigenous to the Arctic region, with the installation screening in Australia, Europe, Greenland, the Middle East and South America throughout 2025.
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Indie Fests Go Hard on Sustainability
A fleet of independent festivals expanded their sustainability programs this year. Miami’s longstanding dance festival Ultra reported diverting 96,537 pounds of waste, recycling more than 31,000 pounds of materials and saving nearly 19,000 pounds of usable food and beverages at this year’s festival alone. Since this program, called Mission: Home, launched in 2019 (with Ultra taking 2020 and 2021 off due to the pandemic), it has expanded to include 61 initiatives, including waste reduction, community engagement and shifting three of its stages to grid power, which eliminated the need for diesel generators.
Meanwhile, Nashville’s Deep Tropics festival returned with a sustainability program that also focused on waste diversion. The sold-out fest, which was preceded by a sustainability summit that hosted roughly 15,000 attendees over its two days, had no trash cans on site, with all materials being either compostable, recyclable or reusable. In 2024, the festival said it reached an 87% diversion rate, saving 7,387 pounds of waste from entering landfills. Deep Tropics will expand to three days in 2026.
The London festivals Junction 2 and Paradise in the Park went meat-free this year, both offering 100% vegetarian and vegan dining options at their events in July and August. The program by festival producer BM Park Live, which puts on both these events along with other music events in London’s Boston Manor Park, also involved 80 artists on the Junction 2 lineup agreeing not to use private jets to travel to the festival. All attendees were also charged £1.75 (roughly $2.40) to offset travel emissions via the organization onboard:earth, which works to provide low-carbon travel options for live events.
And in Oregon, Cascade Equinox Festival once again offered an initiative that allowed attendees to pay $20 for a hemp “eco-band,” with the money raised used to plant 394 trees in Oregon forests and protect roughly 511 acres of land in Ecuador.
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Music Sustainability Projects Keep Performing
Marquee projects that launched in the last few years returned in 2025. After its 2024 debut, Lollapalooza’s entirely battery-powered main stage returned to the festival this summer, with all lighting, audio and video components powered by a hybrid battery system. Lolla organizers said that in 2024, this system resulted in a 67% reduction in both fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions over prior years, when batteries had not been used.
This year, Sounds Right, the cross-DSP playlist that generates royalties for conservation projects by crediting Nature as an artist via samples like bird calls and wind sounds, announced that it had raised a total of $400,000 for Indigenous and community-led conservation in the Amazon and Congo Basin regions. First launched in 2024, the project also added roughly 50 new tracks by a myriad of artists to the playlist in 2025.
Additionally, r.World, which makes reusable plastic cups and serveware for mass gatherings, reported that since launching in 2017, it’s kept 20 million single-use cups and serveware items out of landfills. “Reuse is common in most developed countries. The U.S. was behind,” r.World founder Michael Martin told Billboard in November. “As more and more U.S. venues are discovering the benefits of reuse, the demand is skyrocketing. The country’s leading venues are moving to reuse and away from single use.”
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Waste Reduction Ruled
To wit, efforts to mitigate the use of single-use plastics in the industry also expanded elsewhere, with electronic producer Blond:ish launching Zero Plastic Club: NYC.
An extension of the Bye Bye Plastic organization that the producer started in 2019, Zero Plastic Club is working to prevent the use of 42 tons of waste from New York’s nightlife industry annually by engaging the city’s nightlife community to focus on reducing and eliminating the use of plastic bottles, cups, wristbands and other single-use items left behind after events. The project is also working to collect 3,000 signatures by Dec. 31 to demonstrate public demand for the program. (Sign the call to action here.)
This type of waste management was also addressed at the second annual Music Sustainability Summit in Los Angeles in April. There, AEG’s vp of sustainability Erik Distler noted that the company’s 20,000-capacity Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles employs a full-time sorting team that opens every bag of refuse created at its 250 annual events. The team then sorts refuse into recycling, reuse, waste and compost streams.