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Media
LayFlats Music & Arts Festival Moves Quickly To Be CarbonFree
LayFlats Music and Arts Festival is only in its second year, but already the celebration of local culture in West Lafayette, IN, is taking big steps to mitigate its environmental impact. This year, founders Johnny Klemme and Travis Easter are focused on making recycling bins ubiquitous, and encouraging carpooling, bicycling, and public transit, and offsetting the event’s carbon impact.
Through Carbonfund.org’s CarbonFree Events program, they are offsetting the festival’s likely carbon footprint and then some.
Known locally as LayFlats, the LayFlats Arts and Music Festival is an annual outdoor music and arts festival held at the Tippecanoe Outdoor Amphitheater in West Lafayette, Indiana. This multi-day family festival takes place at a 160 acre wooded park with proceeds supporting local charities to benefit children’s art therapy, outreach and support programs. The festival, scheduled for September 12-13, features 60 bands of a variety of musical styles on five stages, various music and arts workshops, and local food.
“We’ve all been involved in the art and music scenes in West Lafayette,” said Klemme, “and there had never been a festival focused solely on local art and music. This city’s full of talented people who deserve recognition, so we took it upon ourselves to make it happen.”
West Lafayette, home of Purdue University, has taken steps as a municipality to encourage a culture of going green. Former Mayor Jan Mills started a city “Go Green” Commission, and recently city officials wrote the commission into the city plan.
After a letter to the editor of a local paper challenged LayFlats to match the recycling efforts of a nearby bluegrass festival, Klemme and his partners started to look hard at their festival’s environmental footprint. Their first focus was to beef up recycling efforts. “Last year sorting through the trash for recyclables was a huge task,” said Klemme. “This year we are simply covering the grounds in recycling bins.”
Klemme also researched carbon offsets because he wanted to find a way to calculate the carbon footprint for the up to 5,000 festival-goers who could attend. Carbonfund.org’s Climate Change Specialist Lindsey Robinett helped him calculate the carbon footprint. Even though LayFlats is doing its best to encourage bicycling and carpooling by giving away prizes to riders and to cars with four or more passengers, Klemme wanted to work with conservative estimates. “We did our best to calculate our total CO2 emissions based on having 5,000 people drive without carpooling to the Tippecanoe Outdoor Amphitheatre during the course of our two day event. Then we nearly doubled our carbon offset as we plan on a huge turnout,” said Klemme. As a result, LayFlats is offsetting 198,360 pounds of CO2 emissions through the support of Carbonfund.org’s projects.
Klemme admires what festivals like Bonnaroo and Pitchfork have done about mitigating their environmental impacts, and he hopes that LayFlats will serve as inspiration to other festivals.
For more information, visit the LayFlats Music Festival website.
