Bryan Birch, Co-Founder of ZeroHero

MUSE recently spoke with Bryan Birch, one of the founders of ZeroHero.  ZeroHero delivers onsite cleanliness, waste diversion, and increased efficiency for events and festivals.

Bryan Birch is the co-founder and CEO of ZeroHero. He’s been working in the sustainable events industry since 1999.

Hi Bryan!  Tell us more about you, and how ZeroHero got started?

I was born and raised in Michigan, and in 1994 I went to Colorado State University where I studied Environmental Education.  I got really into sustainability, and thought I would be a forest ranger. At that time, biodiesel, solar, vermicomposting, and permaculture were hitting mainstream consciousness, and it seemed like a shift was happening in the environmental movement.  I joined an organic farming alliance, we had a half acre garden which became our organizing hub. We started a little festival called the Sustainable Living Fair when I was senior year in 1999 (learn about the history of the Sustainable Living Fair here). That was my entrance into the event and festival world - and why I’m still working in this industry today.

About four or five years into the Sustainable Living Fair, we hit about 10,000 attendees, and considering this was a grassroots event, we were really proud of this.  We had New Belgium as a title sponsor, and we were bringing in people like Amy Goodman and Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, as speakers. But we were starting to generate waste, and we had to pay attention to the environmental impact.

We were always trying to get Michael Franti to come play at our event, and it never happened. But he played a couple shows in Denver, at the Fillmore, in October 2006. Some of us went down and helped him make them Zero Waste shows, bringing in products that could be either composted or recycled.  We did all the measuring and waste diversion metrics. And that was the beginning of what turned out to be ZeroHero. We became a business by taking what we’d learned about sustainable operations from our own event, and began working with clients who wanted to improve the environmental footprint of their events. 

That’s such an organic way to start a business!

From an organic garden, literally, to the beginnings of the company.  

There were three original co-founders of ZeroHero, including one who had also just started a biodiesel business.  This helped break the ice of entrepreneurship, and we were able to organize ourselves into a company. It’s been a wild ride, but I feel fortunate to be able to do this for a living.

What different kinds of events and festivals have you worked on over the years?  What are your favorite types of events?

Before Covid, we were working on 35 to 45 events and festivals a year. Many small to medium size boutique festivals like, New Belgium Tour de Fat  and food and wine festivals.  We’ve done bike tours, including some where we created apps for sustainable tours of the Rocky Mountains, Oregon coast, Yellowstone National Park, and the Adirondacks.  We’ve worked on yoga festivals, including years of working with the Wanderlust festivals.  We’ve had a great partnership over the last 12-13 years with Cloud 9 Adventures out of Boca Raton who do jam cruises and other destination events in and throughout the Caribbean. (Read more about Cloud 9 Adventures Positive Legacy) 

One of our first events was when Barack Obama was nominated for President in Denver in 2008.  We were hired to do consulting for the event at Mile High stadium. We were backstage, and I actually gave Obama a fist bump, which was my peak in the industry.  Pretty glamorous for being in the trash business, I thought. 

Barak Obama at the Mile High Stadium in 2008

What's my favorite type of festival? There's different categories. The PGA tournament is so cool. BottleRock in Napa, California really excited me, and The Wonderful Festival.  I love working on events that are really ready for a change, and budgeted to pay for a change.  Ones that have top down support from the producer or top organizational level, that are really ready to track their waste diversion and carbon footprint. 

And something entirely new, we're a couple years into a pilot project with the United States Forest Service to provide waste diversion, recycling, and sustainable operations at US Forest Service fire camps. The Forest Service has super aggressive goals on the books for a long time, like 40% waste diversion.  These camps have a range of 300-5,000 firefighters depending on the size of the fire.  It’s been a really interesting jump from festivals to working with the US Forest Service. Some of the fires happen in remote areas, and they want to reduce the stressors and the impacts on local landfills everywhere. 

Do these camps spring up right when there is a fire?  Or, are the camps already set up in areas where there is a high probability of fires?

They spring up. They’re true to the event business that we're used to. You're looking at shower trucks, laundry trucks, caterers, yurts, etc. Of course they have their own systems that are a lot more basic than what we find at events in terms of aesthetics, but similar in terms of practice, similar in terms of assessment. Logistically, it’s different because areas might spread out over 40 miles. You might have a main ICP (Incident Command Post) for the bulk of the firefighters, and additional Spike Camps and Fort Operating Bases elsewhere.

It’s complicated to integrate a waste diversion program into this system, but it's very rewarding when it works well. You gain a lot of confidence when you have a festival you've been doing for several years, and you're getting maybe 60% - 70% by weight, waste diversion. And then you have a new project, that has all these different logistical challenges, and you're at like 20% - 30% diversion. It’s really important to hit these beginning goals.  Working for the Forest Service on these types of projects reminds me of where many events were several years ago.  

This is so interesting, because we say that the event industry can be a leader in sustainability,  and literally the US government has hired an event company to help them hit their sustainability goals.

Absolutely. A lot of the initiatives that started in the festival and events industry were very grassroots and volunteer-led, often without the full support of a producer or the top.  They were fan initiatives, or you can go back to what PHISH was doing with Clean Vibes way back when (read more here).  A lot of what we do today just grew out of the need, and want, of attendees wanting to have better programs. So now that the Forest Service is improving their operations, and implementing some of the things that we've honed in the event industry, it’s really neat.

We could certainly get into a semi-political conversation about what is that impact that we’re having in the midst of a 250 square mile fire enhanced by climate change. What is that recycling doing? But I think it’s the right thing to do. And I think everything needs to begin somewhere.  The initial feedback from the sustainability directors at the Forest Service, and the personnel onsite, is that our teams are very well received, and they are happy to see this work being done. 

Hopefully, there will be cost savings as well, and that would be a win-win-win.

Cost savings is definitely a metric that we’re tracking.  The data, analysis and waste diversion reports are heavier working with the US government than any private event that I've ever worked on.  We worked on a fire camp in a remote area, and a 40-yard dumpster of trash was $1,600.  Anyone that's worked in events knows that's very expensive. So we’re tracking exactly what those cost savings were through diversion, through the recycling process, and which was less expensive in terms of hauling the trash. 

Have you found the challenges of waste diversion are getting easier or staying the same?

There's a lot of challenges around the recycling industry in general right now. Quite honestly, many issues with waste have to do with packaging. I think the recycling industry gets a bad rap, and while part of that is deserved, we’re really missing the point because we’re not looking at the complete system of waste. We need to start looking at the full-cycle uses of products that produce waste, and there needs to be a plan for that waste.  Somehow it needs to plug into a recovery system if we want to address the bigger issues with the recycling program.  I truly believe in the recycling industry, I truly believe in waste diversion, and more importantly waste reduction. Our future can’t involve throwing energy away, things will be captured and reused. 

While I’m fascinated to hear from people on the commodities end, I have more expertise in the front of the house, and the behavioral aspect, and designing a program that people are going to use. Keep in mind, even festivals with the most successful waste diversion programs will sometimes appear to be completely trashed.  Because you get 50,000 people together, and they're all huddled up in a bowl, people leave their stuff behind. 

What are some examples of waste diversions done exceptionally well?  What works the best?

I think one of the neatest front of house programs that I was involved with comes from The High Five Program and their “Electricology Program” in Electric Forest (see here for details). This program was designed to reduce the waste at festival campgrounds by creating initiatives where attendees bring their waste to drop off stations throughout the weekend, and earn all sorts of really cool prizes and experiences.  From hot air balloon rides, to pizza parties, and being able to attend VIP sets. 

Another super cool concept they came up with was this idea of the prize cart. When a band is finishing a set at a main stage, you have hundreds if not thousands of people leaving. Then all of a sudden this cart pulls in with lights and all sorts of schwag on it from hammocks to backpacks, and stuff that people actually want. They pass out trash bags, and encourage people to pick up trash, and bring it to the cart where they get prizes in exchange for the bags full of trash.

You're still gonna see optics that make festivals look pretty dirty. When you have thousands of people, and you’ll always have people that leave stuff on the ground. But initiatives like Electricology make real measurable impacts on operations.  I was brought in to help design the program, and I think we shaved off days of clean up time.  

So by incentivizing the festival attendee to collect their own waste, and other people’s waste, it will reduce the time it takes the festival to clean up, which sounds like it will save the organizers a lot of money. Right?

Oh yeah, you're talking tens of thousands of dollars by shaving off days of clean up for a top tier festival. So yes, absolutely measurable. It’s very cool to see some of the metrics.  You always have a feeling that if you've got to right, you can hit some of those targets.  And then to see it actually happen, and materialize on the spot, is very rewarding, especially when you're trying to justify a greeting program, and how it fits into a larger operation of a festival. 

I think that with front of house programs, the first and most important thing is appealing to an individual's higher sense of responsibility and stewardship. I think that's tier one. Most people have a sense that, as a community, we should take care of our own stuff, and clean up after ourselves, right? So appealing to that actually comes before creating an initiative like a rewards system.

What advice would you give someone that doesn’t have a budget to hire an event greening company?

One entry point for an event that doesn't have an organized front of house team is to decide what products should not be part of your festival. You can actually have this become part of the ethos of your event.  It can be a statement on a website, or whatnot that says, “Hey, we're not perfect, we're not claiming to be perfect. We're not going to hit zero waste, but we want to track this. It's important for us to start this process, because we recognize that there's waste when a lot of people get together and consume a lot of things.” 

In terms of budget, recycling doesn't have to cost more. So let's talk about labor costs, maybe you don't have a crew, right? Because you can bring in recycling containers for the same amount of money as a trash container. So your limitation is you that don't have money to throw in a crew to really help get it going.  So I recommend looking at what should be banned from your festival. What can be reduced? How could you put in sponsorship agreements or vendor agreements, and food vendor agreements, to keep certain things away that you know is just poor practice, like styrofoam and plastics.

And even before you think about recycling, you can have an impact through that initial organization and your ethos. This is who we are. This is what we don't want. We don't want to produce a bunch of plastic water bottles, so can we partner with someone who's doing water stations? What are things that’s going to eliminate a lot of the waste before it starts? I think that that would be a good entry point. 

What are some of the biggest mistakes? Have you seen any of those facepalm moments? 

There's a lot of facepalm moments. I had a crew put in so much time and energy into getting some clean roll offs of recycling. And we combed through this container, and there was very little contamination. It was a perfectly great container of recycling that was going to leave the site. After we left, some people that weren’t aware threw some plastic bags on the top by mistake. And the driver sees that, and just takes it all to the landfill. I mean, talk about the most faceplant moment.  So stuff like that sometimes happens, and it feels like you're on a spinning wheel running against gravity. It is hard work to get clean recycling, it takes a lot of labor, it takes a lot of time, and people to make sure that it's working correctly. So when such a little thing takes away hours and hours of work it hurts. 

Thank you for sharing that. There's so many moving parts, so many people, some of you can't be everywhere at all time, and these things are going to happen, and I’m sure it’s really painful.

There's tons of times where, despite great efforts, something goes wrong, and it doesn't work out. Trash is a messy business, and it's a very dynamic working environment.

If you could come up with one “best practice,” and you could magically just snap your finger and all of a sudden, everybody in the industry did this without having to teach people, or go through a learning process, what would it be?

It would probably be to zoom out and think about what, as an industry, could make the biggest effect that would resonate outside of our industry. Maybe it would be that no live event is going to use plastic water bottles anymore. And this alone is very difficult logistically.

But just seeing what's happening with plastics right now on beaches in our hemisphere. Throughout the Caribbean and Mexico, I mean, we're talking about the amount of plastics in our oceans right now that are washing up on the beaches.  You can go and see with your own eyes, buy a plane ticket to the most popular beaches in the Caribbean and Mexico. Just walk from the resort beach a little ways where they're not raking and grooming the sand. And you'll see how much plastic is washing up right now. So if we were to eliminate disposable plastics, that would be such a huge statement for our industry to make.

The "dense garbage carpet" that is washing onto Montesinos Beach in Dominican Republic

Beyond waste diversion, what are some other measures that can be taken to green events?

It depends how deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go. I'm not talking about vendors, I'm talking about the owners and producers of the events.  How far down the rabbit hole do the decision makers want to go? There are events and festivals out there designed around having every sustainable practice from solar trailers to biodiesel. It's an old saying about sustainability that there's no silver bullet. But there's kind of a silver buckshot, whenever there's a lot of different, smaller things that can come together to make a larger impact. 

I think that accountability for carbon is important.  Even burning biodiesel is burning and emitting carbon.  So what about making a really fat donation as a festival to an organization like Trees, Water and People out of Fort Collins, Colorado.  They have programs that are evaluated by the United Nations for reducing carbon carbon sequestration.  Programs that address carbon in terms of climate change are absolutely needed to be the future of our planet.  So I think it's important to invest in things that sequester carbon.  Stove programs for rural areas that are reducing use of wood for cooking and improving air quality, there's, there's so many different things like this, really.

And this is why it's a creative exercise with sustainability and planning around an event.  Maybe the person has a passion for biking, so they could totally have a focus based on their ethos, that this year’s festival is going to be dedicated to all the two wheels out there.  And they can raise awareness, and raise money for local biking initiatives, or buying bikes for kids or something. So it's really unlimited, there's so much that can be done. Right?

Do you have a passion for waste reduction and spreading the word at events and festivals? ZeroHero is always looking for good people to join their team. From New York to California, Michigan to Alabama!  Contact ZeroHero here.

Website: www.zerohero.org

Instagram: www.instagram.com/zerohero_events

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ZeroHeroEvents