ECHO @RootsPicnic : An Open Invitation to Live Nation: Philly Is Ready to REUSE

Across 18 years, the Roots Picnic has bridged genres, eras, and generations of music, documenting the moments that helped shape who we are as a city and as a people. It is not just a concert. It is a love letter to Philadelphia, a gathering that feels like a family reunion, and one of the most powerful cultural events this country produces. This past weekend more than 80,000 people gathered at Belmont Plateau, and as the nation navigates threats to civil rights, Roots Picnic offered something vital: a space for joy, unity, and the kind of community that does not need to be explained to anyone who has ever been on that hill. As one Philadelphia restaurateur put it at this year’s festival, the Roots represent Black ownership, investing in young creatives, entrepreneurs, and bringing everybody together in the city. That spirit deserves infrastructure that matches it.

The Roots Picnic is managed by Live Nation Urban, a division of Live Nation Entertainment, which also operates six venues across Philadelphia including The Fillmore, Theatre of Living Arts, Punch Line Philly, The Met, Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, and Brooklyn Bowl. That is a significant footprint in our city, and every one of those venues currently relies on single use serviceware every night of the week. Back in 2019,Live Nation publicly pledged to eliminate single use plastics at all owned and operated venues and festivals by 2021. That deadline has come and gone. Our Executive Director worked for Live Nation and saw firsthand how slowly the company moves on waste reduction. When action did come, it came in the form of heavy investment in compostable serviceware at select venues. It sounds good on paper. The reality is that the vast majority of those compostable items never made it to a compost facility. They went straight into the general waste stream, or worse, into recycling bins where compostables are considered a contaminant and can compromise entire loads of recyclable material. Switching materials without building the systems to manage them is not progress. It is a different version of the same problem.

Think about what 80,000 people consuming food and drinks for two full days actually looks like when the music stops. Every cup is used once and becomes an environmental burden. Every plate, every fork, every napkin. A city streets department worker was still out there cleaning at 5am. That is somebody’s mother, somebody’s neighbor, out in the dark picking up what we all left behind after one of the greatest days Philadelphia has to offer.

And what hurts most is what those cups could have been. A reusable cup from the Roots Picnic is not just a cup. It is a piece of Philadelphia, something you hold onto, something you pull out of your cabinet on a Tuesday morning that takes you right back to that hill, that crowd, that feeling. Instead it became litter. Something to be swept up and forgotten. That is the distance between what this festival already is and what it is so close to becoming.

We will say this: we were genuinely glad to see some food vendors at this year’s festival serving food in paper boats rather than styrofoam or plastic clamshells. That is a real step and it deserves acknowledgment. But here is what most people, including most vendors, do not know: those paper boats are not simply paper. They are coated with grease resistant chemicals to keep your food from soaking through. The FDA itself has confirmed that PFAS approved for use as grease proofers on paper and paperboard can potentially migrate into food, and Consumer Reports tested more than 100 food packaging products and found these forever chemicals in many types of packaging, from paper bags for french fries to molded fiber bowls and single use paper plates. Several of these chemicals are linked to increased cholesterol levels, impact on infant birth weights, effects on the immune system, and possible increased risk of cancer. The harder truth is that most vendors have no idea what their containers are treated with because the identities of replacement chemicals are typically proprietary information. Paper is not automatically safe. The coating is the problem. Reuse is not just the environmental choice. At an 80,000 person festival where people are eating hot food out of coated paper all day long, it is the healthiest one too.

We also want to be honest about the logistics: 80,000 people is not a simple task. But it is far from impossible, and other festivals have already proven it. Outside Lands in San Francisco partnered with r.Cup and avoided more than 250,000 single use cups in 2023 alone. Live Nation’s own pilot of the TURN reusable cup system at Bonnaroo saw an 88% return rate, and at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte fans returned 90% of cups. The technology exists. The proof of concept exists. What is missing, the local investments into this infrastructure and we are committed to making this happen here in Philadelphia.  

We are not here to point fingers. It’s just that disposable plastic is over, if we let it. 

We are here because we love this planet and we love this  city and we believe Live Nation does too. If anyone on the Live Nation or Roots Picnic team is reading this, Let’s build something worth talking about.

And to our readers: your voice matters here. Live Nation needs to hear directly from the people who show up for the Roots Picnic every year, who fill their venues every weekend, and who care deeply about what happens to this city and this community. Write to them. Tell them Philadelphia is ready to lead on reuse and that you expect them to be part of it.

You can reach Live Nation Urban directly through their contact page, and their Philadelphia office is located at 1601 Market Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103. 

Let them hear from you.

Or sign this petition now. 

We’ll be tabling at Jack Johnson’s concert at the end of this month, come find us if you are there. We will be at the All For One, Upstream/ ECHO Table