Green Trunk Productions Brings Environmentally Sustainable Shows To Nashville

Sustainability is being tackled by major festivals like Bonnaroo, where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate music. Bonnaroo even publishes a sustainability report on their efforts. But what about the waste at smaller events?

Nashville-based Green Trunk Productions are looking to prevent the environmental scars of live music. As the pandemic ravaged the live event space last year, CEO and Founder Claire Savoie had a vision to start a sustainable music festival. Three other women messaged Claire individually and came together over Zoom to get started: Katherine Brophy, Lily Pickering, and Lauren Lucas.

Savoie says, “I started Green Trunk Productions with the goal of normalizing fully sustainable events and educating through every aspect of our productions.” Inspired by a love of the outdoors and Marine Biology as a high school class, Savoie became invested as a teenager on how human actions are affecting our oceans and everything in them. Around the time Savoie began attending Belmont University in 2017, her parents started sustainable consulting company Saint Francis Services.

Seeing her family work to make sustainability a priority in the Archdiocese of Atlanta encouraged Savoie to apply that community work to Nashville. Savoie says, “Through my time at Belmont, I have fallen in love with live music, and have had some of the most spiritual moments of my life at concerts and music festivals.”

A test run to put all of this in motion: SAP Drive, a drive-in concert on April 17. The show will be hosted at Further Farms, a spot in Northwest Nashville that is closer for locals than a famous Manchester Farm. Nashville artists Love You Later, Pacific, Lindsey Lomis, Sun Seeker, and Crumbsnatchers are all set to perform. One dollar of every ticket goes to Urban Green Lab, a Nashville sustainability education non-profit. To create a carbon-neutral show, Green Trunk will calculate the carbon emission of the event and use a carbon offset from nonprofit organization Cool Effect. From using digital tickets to sourcing reused signage, Green Trunk Productions says they consider every event detail to make the most environmentally conscious choices.

Claire and most of the company graduate from Belmont University this spring, and they are planning more fully sustainable shows. That means less junk in the earth: fewer wristbands, plastic beer cups, and glitter for future festival-goers to wade through as they move to the front row. Green Trunk co-founder Lauren Lucas says, “We want to spread the word that it is possible and even easy just taking a little bit more of a conscious effort.”

SAP Drive featuring Love You Later, Pacific, Lindsey Lomis, Sun Seeker and Crumbsnatchers will take place on Saturday, April 17 at 7 p.m. We recommend carpooling to Further Farms at 4700 Eatons Creek Rd, Nashville, TN. Tickets are $50 and available at thesapfest.com.