If you were to drink around one liter of water a day for the rest of your life, you wouldn’t even come close to consuming the amount that Billie Eilish saved in just a few days during her recent Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour.
When she performed four sold-out shows at Co-op Live, the entire venue went vegan for her residency, saving around 3.5 million liters of water. To put that in perspective, you’d have to drink one liter of water every single day for the next 9,600 years to reach that amount.
It’s, quite frankly, a huge volume of water—but it’s not even close to the total Eilish helped save over the full tour, which lasted just over a year. Several venues made similar changes during her shows, and many added more vegan options for the occasion. SAP Center was so impressed by how well plant-based options sold during Eilish’s performances that it has made them a permanent offering.
But this is just a drop in the ocean (forgive the pun) compared to the tour’s wider impact.
Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish’s tour proves sustainability can scale
A report from Reverb reveals that the tour raised more than $13 million for climate action and community organizations, helped donate 7.7 million plant-based meals through food drives and its partnership with Support + Feed, secured pledges from more than 36,000 fans to eat one plant-based meal a day for 30 days in its Eco Villages, and prevented 135,200 single-use bottles from ending up in landfills. In just those four days in Manchester, it also reduced the venue’s emissions by nearly half.
And there’s more. The tour also funded sustainable travel for fans—through initiatives like park-and-ride shuttle buses and free public transport—and offered merchandise made from recycled materials. Plus, there was funding for local grassroots organizations in every country on the tour.
All of this was driven by Eilish and her family’s commitment to sustainability. Alongside her mother, Maggie Baird, founder of Support + Feed, Eilish is a keen advocate for plant-based living and environmental responsibility.
Reverb
A wider transformation
“Things don’t have to be done the same way they’ve always been done,” Eilish told National Geographic. “I make sure that in every single area of my career, and my life, that the first thing I do is ask the question: How can we do this in the most sustainable way possible?”
Eilish and her family are having a big impact on the music industry. Support + Feed has recently worked with several artists, including Hayley Williams and The Format, to host food drives at tour stops.
The impact on fans is significant, too. We live in a parasocial world, after all. “The amount of times I’ve met fans who have told me, ‘My whole family became vegan because of you. We had no idea it was such an enormous part of the climate crisis,’” Eilish explained. “Or when someone says, ‘You know, I work as an activist because of this thing that I saw you posted.’”
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Charlotte is a VegNews editor and writer based in sunny Southsea on England's southern coast.
