Eco-friendly touring is simply good business, says Coldplay star
‘We’re trying to show that being clean and green is not some charitable Left-wing wishy-washy thing’
THE Coldplay singer Chris Martin has declared that the Grammy award-winning band began embarking on eco-friendly tours to generate money instead of a “wishy-washy” attempt to promote climate change.
Martin, the band’s frontman, said he wanted to demonstrate a greener way of travelling across the world for shows that proved it wasn’t costly or impractical. In 2019, Coldplay announced they would not tour their newly released album, Everyday Life, until their travel was done without harm to the environment.
Speaking to the singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding on BBC’S Radio 4 Today programme, Martin said: “What we’re trying to do is actually not advocate at all, but just prove that it makes business sense because that’s where we feel you’ll really get people to change, saying, ‘Hey, you can make more money’.”
He explained: “For a lot of people that’s their primary consideration in every wealth bracket, so we’re really trying to show on this tour that being clean and green isn’t some charitable Left-wing wishy-washy thing. It’s like, no, this is the best business sense too.”
Since Coldplay’s announcement in 2019, band members have devised a 12-point plan to cut their carbon footprint with specialists and have embarked on a world tour of their ninth studio album, Music of the Spheres, which continues in the new year.
According to the plan they devised, the group’s emissions are on track to be reduced by nearly 50 per cent in comparison to their A Head Full of Dreams tour, where they staged 122 shows across five continents in 2016 and 2017.
Some of the methods that Coldplay have implemented to tackle their emissions include supporting projects based on reforestation, rewilding and conservation as well as minimising travel, building sustainable sets and using energy-efficien special effects that are more energy-efficient.
They also announced last summer that they had planted five million trees to represent roughly one for every ticket sold on their world tour so far. This is equivalent to one quarter of the estimated 20 million trees planted in the UK each year. Goulding, who interviewed Martin while guest editing the Today programme yesterday, said that he had “inspired” her.
She told him: “I tried to do [it] slightly smaller-scale on my tour… and I used your tour as a reference for everyone.
“It was really tiny compared, but you guys really inspired me to do that. You cut emissions by nearly 50 per cent from your previous stadium tour, which is huge. You diverted 66 per cent of all your tour waste from landfill and the power for the show’s production is powered by electric battery, so in turn that’s using 100 per cent renewables.”
Addressing Coldplay’s environnmental achievements, Martin said that the tour had become “an expo” for new ideas and technologies for climate change mitigation, adding that the group “haven’t done anything”.
The father-of-one explained: “We haven’t tried to be telling anyone else what to do. It’s just been for us to feel good about touring and right now we’re about halfway towards what we’d like to get to.” The musician said that it was “difficult” to implement an eco-friendly alternative for transport, but has previously said he and the group were prepared to accept backlash for flying privately, for example. “I don’t mind any backlash at all,” he said in 2021, adding: “We’re trying our best, and we haven’t got it perfect… And the people that give us backlash for that kind of thing, for flying, they’re right.”
Elsewhere on the BBC programme, which Goulding guest edited to shine a spotlight on the climate crisis, the 36-year-old singer revealed that despite teaming up with Sir David Attenborough for the soundtrack to his Netflix series Our Planet, she never wanted to release an environmental anthem.
“I was never too keen on writing an Earth song,” she said, adding: “I was never too keen on mixing my activism with my music.”