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Santa Barbara festivals and venues have found creative solutions to the environmental challenges posed by big events.
Events attract hordes of people. What comes with people? Trash.
Events also have to provide people with food, water, and bathrooms, which require electricity and light. Large events — festivals, concerts, even half marathons — can be the bane of an environmentalist’s existence.
Or they can serve as an opportunity. An opportunity to rethink single-use plastics, or how thousands of people get to one place at the same time. To sort trash so what can be recycled makes it to a recycling center. To use solar panels instead of diesel generators.
Over the past year, several of Santa Barbara’s largest venues and events have been building systems to reduce their footprint, acknowledging that if you’re going to host the masses, you might as well do it responsibly.
In the words of Eric Shiflett, the Santa Barbara Bowl’s programs director, “We feel like we should be stewards of that land and have no impact on the community that we serve in a negative way.”
The Santa Barbara Bowl
“Our impetus for trying to be one of the greatest venues in the world is just the fact that we’ve been entrusted by Santa Barbara County,” Shiflett says. The stewardship he speaks about shows up most visibly at the bar.
“No cup served at the Santa Barbara Bowl is in a single-use cup, aside from some coffee,” Shiflett says. Every drink is poured into a reusable cup, called an r.cup, that gets tossed in a designated bin, washed, and cycled back into use. “We have a harvest rate close to 96% year over year,” he says, meaning 96% of cups successfully go through the process to reenter the system. Every r.cup can be used up to 200 times before being retired.
Aside from r.cups, the Bowl sells souvenir pint glasses and offers those who use them $2 off refills for the life of the cup.
The Bowl also focuses on trash — anything that ends up in the garbage on concert nights is sorted, leading to a nearly 75% diversion rate from the landfill — and transportation. The Bowl’s free bike valet, run by Move Santa Barbara, logged record participation in 2025. Anyone who rides their bike to the venue gets complimentary bike parking and security at the closest possible location to the entrance and exit of the Bowl.
Then there’s energy. The Santa Barbara Bowl has more than 200 solar panels that help power its shows. Split between ground-mounted arrays and rooftop systems, the panels create energy equal to — or, fingers crossed, more than — what the Bowl uses during its colorfully lit shows.
“Last year, we offset 100% of the energy we used throughout the year,” Shiflett says. “We planned it so that we have a net-zero energy use each year.”
Festivals
If concerts are complex, festivals are chaos. Logan Goldberg, an event and production manager who works on Earth Day Festival, Summer Solstice, and Fields of Funk, knows this well. Hosting tens of thousands of people at once leaves little room for environmental idealism without the infrastructure to make it a reality.
“Five years ago, when we were hosting 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people at an event, there weren’t a lot of options,” Goldberg said.
Now, there are more and more to be able to green-ify events at scale. For Earth Day and other major festivals, Goldberg has begun supplementing diesel generators with solar-powered alternatives. “It’s not fully there yet in terms of being able to power everything,” he says, “but we’re implementing that transition.”
Like the Bowl, many festivals have shifted to reusable cups. Instead of buying tens of thousands of disposable plastic cups for beer gardens and water stations, events use a reusable cup service that supplies, collects, sanitizes, and redistributes cups between events.
“I’m no longer having to buy $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 worth of plastic cups,” Goldberg says.
Food vendors are pushed toward compostable containers and local sourcing, particularly at Earth Day. Behind the scenes, water conservation efforts extend down to the grass beneath festival tents.
By saturating irrigation weeks in advance and cutting water use closer to event dates, Goldberg says, large venues can save “hundreds of thousands of gallons.” More than that, it actually helps the grass withstand a crowd of people standing on top of it.
Chumash Casino Showroom
At the Samala Showroom inside Chumash Casino Resort, sustainability is measured in pounds.
“In 2025, we managed 2.6 million pounds of material through the property and successfully recycled more than 91% of it,” says Mark Funkhouser, executive director of facilities for Chumash Enterprises.
We feel like we should be stewards of that land and have no impact on the community that we serve in a negative way.
– Eric Shiflett, Santa Barbara Bowl programs director
The resort operates under a TRUE Zero Waste program, meaning waste is separated at the source rather than being sorted later. According to Funkhouser, “Zero Waste means recycling over 90% of the materials that come into the casino without incineration.”
That includes some unexpected items. Inside the showroom, lightly used trash bags from bingo operations are recycled through a Santa Maria–based partner and converted into post-consumer resin pellets.
“Since 2014, this strategy has allowed us to reduce the incoming waste stream by approximately 1 million pounds per year,” Funkhouser says.
Santa Barbara Half Marathon
Running events leave thousands of literal footprints — as well as an environmental one. There are those goodie bags after the race, the medals, and, of course, the water stations.
“It’s always a work in progress, and we’re never doing enough,” says David Monico, event director for the Santa Barbara Half Marathon.
One major change came in participant shirts. “Most race shirts are polyester blends,” Monico says. “Not recyclable.” Last year, the event switched to 100% cotton shirts — more expensive, but less environmentally problematic.
“You multiply that by 7,500 shirts, and all of a sudden, you’re not making any money,” he says.
But such a large volume of shirts — or even medals — has an effect. The finisher medals are now made from recycled metals, further folding the post-race “goodies” into a cyclical process.
Water — specifically its container — proved to be a hurdle. Pre-pandemic partnerships helped the race offset the cost of using aluminum bottles instead of plastic. When those partnerships dried up, sticking with aluminum bottles, rather than switching back to plastic, added thousands of dollars to the budget. But the half-marathon stuck with its commitment. “We made the decision that we’re not turning back,” Monico says.
Beyond using aluminum bottles, the race provides “big water monsters” — large blue multigallon containers where runners can refill their bottles. As for the thousands of small cups of water handed out throughout the race, those are compostable, which Monico says is one of the “best developments that have occurred” when it comes to sustainability.
