Coldplay pause touring until they can reduce environmental impact of concerts

In a bid to reduce the environmental impact of their touring, Coldplay have confirmed that they won’t be taking to the road to promote their latest album.

In an interview with BBC News earlier this week, frontman Chris Martin said the band are taking their time to work out how to make touring sustainable and not damaging to the environment.

Martin told BBC News "we're taking time over the next year or two to work out how our tour can not only be sustainable (but) how can it be actively beneficial.”

Martin said that rather than just be sustainable, he wanted to the tours to have a positive impact, but that flights for the band, crew and gear represented the biggest hurdle to that.

Martin also said he wanted to remove single-use plastics from Coldplay shows and for performances to be solar-powered, adding “we've done a lot of big tours at this point. How do we turn it around so it's not so much taking as giving?"

Touring blockbuster musical acts is a carbon-intensive process, according to Green Touring Network, a collaboration of Germany's Green Music Initiative and the Popakademie Baden-Wurttemberg.

Stage structures need to be trucked from venue to venue, and shipped between continents. The band and crew, often dozens of people all up, need to be flown and bussed around.

Venues require a lot of energy to power and they produce food and plastic waste while fans also contribute to the environmental impact

According to the Network's Touring Guide, the second-highest source of emissions for a smaller-scale show is the travel of fans to the venue.

Radiohead, a pioneer in sustainable touring, found that for a couple of tours it did in 2003 and 2006 the vast majority of emissions came from fans, much of that because they were driving to see the shows.

The band subsequently tried to fundamentally alter the way it toured in an attempt to reduce its environmental footprint, and the result was 2008's Carbon Neutral World Tour.

Concerts were held in urban areas, near public transportation, and attendees were urged to use it. Meanwhile, equipment was rented locally, venues were asked to purchase green power and light shows used LED lighting.

The last year has seen Australasian venues look to improve their environmental impact with the reduction of plastic waste a key focus while Coldplay are not alone in trying to address the impact of touring on the environment.

Billie Eilish has announced plans to make her world tour “as green as possible” by banning plastic straws, encouraging fans to bring refillable water bottles and providing comprehensive recycling facilities.

Every venue on the tour, commencing next March, will feature the ‘Billie Eilish Eco-Village’, where fans can learn about their role in the climate crisis. Those who pledge to fight the climate crisis with the organisation Global Citizen can earn free tickets to shows.

The 1975 have committed to plant a tree for every ticket sold to their UK arena tour in February and have committed to syop producing new tour T-shirts, instead screen-printing a new design over old merchandise stock.

Emma Banks, co-founder of leading tour agents Creative Artists Agency, questioned the need for musicians to tour at a scale that might require dozens of trucks to transport equipment.

Banks told the BBC “while I certainly don’t want to be putting anybody out of business, I think we have to start being realistic and going, ‘OK, let’s just dial it down a bit’.”

Berish Bilander, the co-Chief Executive of Green Music Australia, which campaigns for sustainability in the industry, told the ABC earlier this year that plastic waste had been the main talking point so far in the music industry.

On Friday, he said he was "rapt" with Coldplay's decision, stating “this is a planetary crisis and every human is affected. Artists have a really crucial role to play and it's great to see bigger artists stepping up.”

Australian festivals variously utilise composting toilets and emissions offsetting, while in June musicians including members of Midnight Oil and Regurgitator came together to form FEAT, a platform that allows musicians to invest in solar farms to offset their carbon emissions.

Live Nation aims to have its venues and events produce zero waste to landfill by 2030 and to phase out the sale of single-use plastics by 2021, according to its sustainability charter.

Coldplay last came to Australia as part of their A Head Full of Dreams tour in 2016.

Image: Coldplay at Asia World Expo Hong Kong in 2009.