In 2010 we estimate the average beer drinker over 3 days of Pickathon festivities will go through roughly 7-10 plastic cups which means we are on target to consume around 20-30 thousand plastic cups in just the beer gardens alone!

We are not happy with this thought and so we have been brainstorming how we could eliminate all plastic cups as well as minimizing plastic use overall.

We would love to hear your feedback on two basic ideas that will lead us towards these plastic free goals:

Idea #1
Instead of buying a beer and recycling your plastic cup every time, would you be willing to help us reach this goal by buying a sweet, 16oz. stainless steel cup with the Pickathon logo on it that you’d be able to reuse the whole weekend? You’d pay a little more for only your first beer, (roughly $8-9 for the cup + beer), and at that time you’d receive your reusable stainless steel cup (every beer after the first would then only cost $4). You would also be responsible for keeping track of your cup and rinsing it out during the festival. We’ll do everything we can to make that easy for you, by providing some local storage in the beer gardens, making available some sort of inexpensive carrier for the cup, and providing potable water for rinsing. The payoff is twofold. Pickathon would be the first large outdoor music festival to completely eliminate all beer garden plastic cups and you get to keep your very own Pickathon stainless steel cup, forever.

Idea #2
What do you think of Pickathon eliminating the use of plastic bottled water throughout all of the festival? Instead of selling bottled water, we’d encourage everyone to bring their own water bottles. For those people who forget we would have paper cups as well as the ability to purchase a high quality stainless steel Klean Kanteen that you’d be able to fill up at numerous water stations on the festival grounds. Plenty of water would be available, it just won’t be in plastic bottles!