Dave Matthews of Dave Matthews Band performs onstage for day one of the 2024 Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival at The Park at Harlinsdale Farm on Sept. 28, 2024, in Franklin, Tennessee.

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Dave Matthews’ goal for a more sustainable life on the road is over two decades in the making.

Outside of his eponymous band’s status as one of the highest-selling live bands in the industry, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer has cultivated a legacy in the music industry as an early pioneer in building out greener tours, looking to fundraise for environmental causes and minimize waste from his shows.

Back in 2005, DMB was one of the first groups to partner with music sustainability nonprofit Reverb, which has long supported the band’s green touring efforts, including monitoring carbon emissions and running eco-village pop-ups at their shows. In 2019, the United Nations Environment Programme named the group Good Will Ambassadors for their advocacy. And over the past three tours, the band has adopted an “On the Road to Zero Waste” initiative with concert promoter Live Nation that they’ve reported has diverted 90 percent of fan waste at concerts from landfills.

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“I always felt a sort of responsibility mixed with shame about the way we treat the planet and human beings,” Matthews tells THR at the start of our phone call when asked about the origins of the band’s sustainability efforts. “Being on the road with the tour bus and the trucks compounded that.”

Of course, it’s not so simple. Touring is an inherently ecologically fraught practice, with a small city’s worth of roadies going across the globe, contributing outsized carbon emissions as they travel by busload or plane. That’s not to mention the individual emissions from concertgoers. Per a 2025 Reverb study, the average tour’s travel emissions were 14 metric tons of CO2, while the average collective fans’ combined per-show travel emissions totaled 527 metric tons.

Those figures, combined with much more existential climate crises like extreme weather, pollution and food insecurity, make eliminating a tour’s worth of plastic feel minuscule. Still, over the course of 20 years, the group’s advocacy has meant 750,000 fewer single use water bottles at shows, per Reverb. And through a partnership with The Nature Conservancy started in 2021 where fans can tack an additional $2 donation onto ticket sales, the band has helped get 6 million trees planted around the world. With this year’s tour, they hope to get to 7 million.

THR got on the phone with Matthews to discuss his efforts to make his tours greener. That conversation turned into a broader, more impassioned look into the singer’s environmental views, from battling corporate greed and his conversations with Jane Goodall to disagreements with Elon Musk on the need to colonize Mars.

You started with sustainable touring initiatives particularly early compared to the broader music industry. What was the initial inspiration?

There’s groups like Reverb, the Nature Conservancy, so many people that are asking the question, “Would you be interested in helping the cause?” And those [nonprofits] very often don’t have the access that I do. It became an easy mandate to say yes.

When someone tells me, “Hey man, you’ve got a big touring company, could you help us with this effort?” of course we say yes. We know all this requires investment, but the obstacle is that the number one focus of the dominant economies of the world is profit.

“Oh, we have to maintain the economy,” fuck you. If we all make just the slightest effort, we can make a difference, but we can’t do it if we don’t insist that the very wealthiest among us and the very most powerful corporations on the planet do the same.

Through your band’s efforts there have been millions of trees planted, 750,000 single use bottles eliminated. But touring is still a very unsustainable practice given the buses, the planes, the carbon emissions. What’s needed to hit that next echelon with touring to stop that impact?

I do think that the mere act of creating more wetlands, planting more trees, fighting to conserve wild lands are good things. I don’t feel like we should look at this like it’s pointless. Of course planting trees isn’t a pointless effort.

Unfortunately for musicians,

Dave Matthews On Green Touring And Saving the Planet