For years we have watched in awe as (one of our EMA founding members and a festival all-star) Tucker Gumber, aka"The Festival Guy", has lit festival grounds with symbolic fire. One of his trailblazing efforts has been that of tackling the problem of trash at festivals.
The above picture shows Tucker making an impact the first year as "The Festival Guy", a professional festival attendee. In a 2013 post, Tucker continued to message about trash on his website by incorporating trash awareness in 50% of the content of his "Rules of Festivaling". He even created a short explainer video for his blog post, "#FestivalHack".
More recently, Tucker received honor-status media coverage by Katie Bain who wrote about him in a piece for The Guardian, The Festival Guy: how one man turned festival-ing into a lifestyle, where he shows off his promotion of reusable cups and utensils as key elements of the festival experience. Tucker also led a workshop during both weekends of Electric Forest which taught festival attendees how to be "a festival pro" (which inclues the usage of his amazing app, of course, FestEvo). Electric Forest also handed over their Instagram platform for a day to our Trash-caring King so he could get the message out to fans about how they could make an impact with his new campaign "Leave No Trace +1". This new campaign he is pushing advocates for the picking up of all personal trash created at a festival as well as someone else who wasn't thoughtful enough to do it for themselves.
Please check out his YouTube channel for FestEvo for informational videos and information on his Festival Goer's Guide.
We are not sure how we will go above and beyond his past and current efforts although we are confident he will find a way. Because of that, we were happy to give Tucker an honoary award for the EMA 2018 Trash to Treasure Challenge for "Cultural Accountability".
