Barenaked Biodiesel

Posted by Tara Lohan at 4:45 PM on February 20, 2007.

For decades the music industry has been synonymous with excess. Leave a concert venue these days and you'll have to wade through piles of discarded plastic cups and then pass endless vendor booths.

And for musicians on the road, life is measured by the amount of miles logged, with a carbon trail that gets bigger all the time.

But bands like Barenaked Ladies are working to change that. Orli Cotel of the recently-launched Sierra Club Radio spoke with BNL's Steven Page this week about how they are working to change their image -- and the business itself.

While BNL has changed their concerts into "eco villages" to promote earth-friendly businesses and products, they realized it wasn't quite enough.

"Then we'd go back to our tour buses with the generators running all day and drink out of disposable plastic cups and so on," said Page. "It just didn't seem fair to be presenting one side to the fans and then see how much work our own industry needed."

So the band came up with some ways to limit their environmental impact while on the road and back stage, as Page explained to Cotel.

You can listen to their whole conversation about the greening of the music industry by visiting Sierra Club Radio. Their weekly program is available on-line any time or it can be downloaded to your MP3 player.

Tagged as: radio, biodiesel, barenaked ladies, sierra club

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.