Red Rocks, Real Impact: How Red Dirt Festival Diverted 68% of Its Waste From the Landfill

Picture it: golden hour in the high desert, a crowd gathered under a shade structure with red rock spires glowing on the horizon, music drifting across the grass. That was the scene at the September 2026 Red Dirt Festival, and behind every chair, cooler, and food wrapper in that crowd, our GreenLight Solutions Green Team was hard at work making sure the festival's footprint on this beautiful landscape was as light as possible.

​We're thrilled to share the results: 68% landfill diversion. That means more than two-thirds of everything festivalgoers threw away that weekend was recycled, composted, or otherwise kept out of a landfill instead of disappearing into the earth for good. For a community event surrounded by some of the most iconic scenery in Arizona, that number isn't just a statistic. It's a promise kept to the land itself.

How We Got There

Every great diversion number is the sum of a lot of small, intentional actions, repeated hundreds of times over a weekend. Our Green Team volunteers built their strategy around recycling, composting, and hands-on waste sorting at every bin, guiding attendees, one cup and one wrapper at a time, toward the right destination. We're especially proud of the extra mile we went on soft plastics: film wrappers and packaging that most events don't even attempt to divert, because they're notoriously hard to recycle. Catching them took extra sorting, extra education, 

and extra care from our volunteers — and it paid off. Numbers like this can be hard to picture, so here's what that diversion translated to in real terms: the greenhouse gases it prevented are equivalent to 3,826 phones charged, or 121 miles driven. Emissions that simply never entered the atmosphere, because a community of music lovers chose to sort their waste a little more carefully.

It Takes a Village
None of this happens without partnership. From the moment the tents went up to the last piece of trash sorted, this event was powered by organizations who share our belief that celebration and sustainability can — and should — go hand in hand. Our heartfelt thanks to:

City of Sedona, Sedona Recycles, and Compost Crowd — thank you for standing behind sustainable events and for helping make this festival's impact possible.

And of course, none of this happens without people. A huge thank-you to our Green Team leads Tre Bryd and to our staff Kandice Barreda , who coordinated every station, shift, and every sorting decision.

Let's Keep This Going
Are you hosting an event? Let's talk about how we can bring this same level of sustainability impact to your next gathering — schedule a Discovery Session with our team and let's build something great together.

Want to get your hands dirty (in a good way)? Join the Green Team and be part of the crew making moments like this possible.

Interested in sponsoring GreenLight's sustainability programs? Reach out to our CEO, Ashley, at [email protected] — we'd love to talk about what's possible together.

Thank you for celebrating sustainability with us. Here's to the next event, the next milestone, and the next 68% we get to beat.