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.
“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, one of the only real sources of income is a tour. Certainly the record industry is a thing of the past except for a couple people making a killing on streams. So more people are touring than ever. I’m not saying driving a bus with 10 people in it is an efficient way of travel, but one person in a car isn’t. It’s maniacal. For me right now, making a plane that runs on a battery isn’t possible. But there are ways that we pollute the planet by killing its ability to rehabilitate itself that are just as consequential.
If we remove 90 percent of the throwaway plastic from our tour, we still leave 10 percent. Still, if we get these practices in place and more people do them, there’s no downside to that.
Do you think the notion of wanting to try for a more sustainable tour is more common among your peers than it was at the beginning?
Well, it’s so much easier to do now, which certainly helps. When you go to these venues now and say that you have to put in water stations, now they have places where people can refill their bottles and not have to buy $10 plastic bottles of water. Just that fact makes it easier for other bands to join in.
You invest in these carbon-neutral or carbon-negative industries. After that, another band might say, “Man, there’s a lot of garbage coming out. We could do this, too.” And for them, it costs nothing because there’s already a road paved. There’s directions on how to make something like that work. So in that sense, I think it’s much easier now, because of Reverb, because of the Nature Conservancy.
You don’t strike me as one trying to take the credit, but I can’t imagine these blueprints exist without earlier groups like yours saying you want to do this. That’s part of it, I’d imagine, to create a sort of trickle down effect.
Yes, or trickle up. But at least we can take some credit for listening to the voices of sensible people. There are so many people in every corner of the planet that are so qualified to tell us what we need to do. We just need to listen to them and then give them the power or access they need to change the world. What we don’t need to do is listen to people that have money at stake. The only thing they have in the game is profit. I don’t necessarily blame them, I’m just saying it’s the illness of the corporate model that doesn’t include taking care of the people or the planet.
Jane Goodall was a dear friend of mine. I once said [to her] that human beings individually are magical, but that as a whole we behave like a cancer, devouring at twice the rate we could sustain ourselves. She said, “We’re not like cancer, we are.”
That’s bleak.
[What she meant] was that cancer untreated will just grow and grow and eventually kill the host without question. And that’s how we’re behaving.
He may not be a lunatic if you sit down with him for dinner, but I suspect he is, and I admire many of the things he’s done, but someone like Elon Musk says we’re going to go to Mars and build a living planet. Are you fucking out of your mind? We have a living planet. We have it here. We don’t need to think we can play God on a dead rock. We need to do it here, and we have the access to it. All we have to do is get out of the way. The planet knows how to save itself. It’s very good at it, it’s been doing it for hundreds of millions of years with great indifference. It will wash us off of its skin. Whether we take the whole living planet with us or we just do ourselves in, it’s indifferent.
George Carlin told a joke like that decades ago. “The planet is fine, the people are fucked.” I want to go back to musicians and their tours. If you could make a wish list for the most ideal version of a tour in terms of environmental impact, how far are we from that?
You always want to dream of somehow having zero waste, right? In my dream, and this applies all over, not just tours, we would put more health into the planet than we would put into the effort of killing it. We could make the planet healthier by our actions. Maybe that’s not a possibility with a touring band, but maybe we can at least be part of the voice toward that sanity. We shouldn’t just say, “Leave no footprints.” We should say, “Leave abundance.”
This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.
