Sustainability

Accreditation & Stewardship

Our beautiful Music Festival venue, Stephens Lake Park, received national accreditation as an arboretum in 2017. To help preserve the beautiful venue, make a tax-deductible donation to the Columbia Parks & Rec Fund and click “I want this donation to go towards the Stephens Lake Park Arboretum” at this link.

Our Festival was honored as the 2019 recipient of the Mayor’s Climate Protection Award in the category of Environmental Stewardship.

These honors have reinforced our continuing goals to expand our sustainability efforts.

How You Can Help

Our Sustainability Director, Scout Merry, our festival management team, and our volunteer green team encourage you to support our sustainable practices in nearly every aspect of the Roots N Blues Festival.

We seek to work with food and drink vendors that integrate green practices in their operations. Vendors are encouraged to use only recyclable and compostable containers and utensils. The vendors who facilitate green practices are given priority marketing in Festival social media as well as on-site signage.

Hundreds of signs are posted throughout the festival grounds to inform patrons that there are two designated smoking areas in the park during the Festival. Otherwise, smoking is prohibited in the park. Logboat Brewing Company provides TerraCycle cigarette butt receptacles in our smoking areas to prevent patrons from dropping cigarette filters in the grass.

City of Columbia Solid Waste staff collected only 10.61 tons of refuse from our 10,000 guests during the three days of the 2018 Festival. This City department also reported the collection of 5.37 tons of #1-7 plastics, aluminum, glass, paper, corrugated cardboard and boxboard during the three days of festival operations. That’s two full City recycling trucks!

The City of Columbia provides us with 100 recycling bins and the University of Missouri Athletic Department supplements that number in support of our efforts to make recycling easily accessible throughout the Festival grounds.

Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, a local nonprofit agency, provides daily composting services for food and drink vendors at the Festival.

Culligan Water provides a public filtered drinking water station in vendor row to encourage festival patrons to bring refillable water bottles.

In our efforts to lead by example, all festival staff and volunteer training sessions and materials include messaging about recycling and tips on how to interact with patrons to encourage and expand our green initiatives.

On the Monday following the Festival, vendors, stages, and tents are removed and the green team’s work expands significantly. The team reported the collection and delivery of twenty pickup truckloads of materials to City of Columbia recycling centers after the Festival.