One of the first years, we had an event that said, “We want you to come clean up afterwards, we don’t really care about the recycling part,” and we said, “That’s nice that that’s how you feel, but if we’re gonna be involved, we’re gonna recycle.” And we saw a shift about ten years ago, or so, where that became really a significant added value of the services we provide, and a lot of that was consumer-driven that the patrons of events were expecting there to be recycling in place at the events. We were kind of pushing the events to incorporate the recycling and composting into that. When we started off, we were basically the folks that could clean up an event.
How have you approached music festivals about “taking on their trash,” so to speak?
#Trash talker clean vibes when are the shifts plus#
One partner left after the first year, and worked about 5 shows in 2000, and somehow now, 19 years later, we’re working 40 plus shows a year and haven’t really looked back.
And in 2000, started our own company, the three of us actually involved. And then as we moved into planning for the Phish show over the millennium, the Big Cypress show, the owner of Great Northeast came to us and said, “You know, you guys have a great business model here-why don’t you run with it and make your own entity out of it all?” So, as we were planning for Big Cypress, we kind of started that process. With the next camping event that they had, the Oswego campout, we started passing out blue bags for recycling, we started what eventually became the Clean Vibes trading post, which was the Clean Vibes raffle trying to engage patrons in the recycling process. Took us about two-and-a-half weeks to clean up the campgrounds, in mostly pouring rain, and as a Phish fan at the time I was left with thinking, “Wow, I don’t know if this is really a scene I wanna be a part of and either I need to just walk away from this, or try to do something about it.” and luckily, I think, I chose the latter. They kind of came up with Clean Vibes and then with the first event that I worked was Lemonwheel in 1998. The folks from the University of New Hampshire had worked with Great Northeast Productions at some UNH shows and after the Clifford Ball, when they were using snow plows to clean up the trash because they didn’t really have a good plan in place for all that was left behind, they reached out to a friend of mine. Simultaneously, I did an internship while I was in college with the band Percy Hill, great jamband from back in the ‘90s, and working for them I met somebody who I had actually started the initial what became Clean Vibes at Phish’s big festival. So I forgot about that, wrote it on something else and it sparked something and I became really passionate about the idea. There’s no literature on it, you can’t follow the formula of a thesis,” and didn’t give me good grades on my initial attempt at that. And at first I thought, “Oh, I’m gonna write my thesis on the environmental impact of outdoor music festivals,” and all of my professors said, “Well, this is a horrible idea. As an undergraduate in environmental studies there, you actually write a thesis.
I went to the University of Vermont, majored in Environmental Studies and had the wacky idea while I was there. With a goal that counterbalances maintaining festival grounds, educating on the impacts of Clean Vibes’ and enjoying the musical climate, Borofsky spoke with us about the history of the organization and how you can participate as a volunteer-an informative adventure and rewarding process for festival-lovers galore.Ĭould you talk a little bit about your background in music and in environmentalism? “We’re creating a city,” says Borofsky, “And we’re showing people that within that city that we just created in a field that we can divert a huge amount of waste and that it is a simple, manageable thing to achieve.” Clean Vibes has since diverted almost 16 million pounds of waste from event sites and continue to work with festivals throughout the nation, most recently Tortuga and Okeechobee Festival as well as a return to Bonnaroo in June, while branching out to working non-musical events after opening a San Francisco branch in 2008. A University of Vermont alumni along the likes of Phish, whose Lemonwheel festival was the kickstart to the almost 20-year-old clean-up, Borofsky’s mission to take on music festival trash has gained her notoriety since the beginnings of Bonnaroo-which the North Carolina-based company has worked with following its inception in 2002. Anna Borofsky’s love for music and environmentalism is the kinship that formed Clean Vibes.
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