T.S. Eliot was dead wrong. April is the coolest month.
That’s certainly true in the East Valley where, over three long weekends, people flock to eat, drink, and be music merry at the Empire Polo Club, host of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and Stagecoach.
In April, the expansive polo and soccer fields make way for stages and food halls and art installations as tall as the White House. The venue cosplays a cool-kids municipality whose 250,000-plus revelers living in the moment might not think about the impact of their residency.
AEG does.
As part of that global sports and entertainment company, promoter Goldenvoice has an agreement through 2050 for operational control of the polo club and its special events. AEG takes its stewardship of the premises seriously.
“We basically design and build a mini city on the polo grounds,” says Meghan Tierney, senior manager of sustainability at AEG. She works with the Goldenvoice team, contractors, vendors, and partners — all “city” departments, if you will — to reduce landfill waste, minimize recycling and carbon emissions, and donate food and materials. Goldenvoice wants to stage successful (read: profitable) music events with minimal negative environmental effect. “We track everything,” Tierney says. AEG’s tally from last year’s festivals: 72.3 tons of material and food redirected for consumption elsewhere, and 308.1 tons spared from landfills via composting and recycling.
What’s good for the Earth is good for the East Valley. Two key beneficiaries of the sustainability program are the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission in Indio and the Galilee Center in Mecca.
The rescue mission was an early volunteer at Coachella, charged with collecting and reclaiming food and materials from the polo grounds. Today, it focuses solely on food. After 18 years, operations director Randy Burke has the drill down pat for the five weeks before, during, and after the events.
Goldenvoice pays catering companies to feed the setup workers — construction crews, security, stagehands, transportation — starting the week before the Coachella festival. Coachella Valley Rescue Mission dispatches 26-foot trucks with a driver and a lumper to fetch all the premade, packaged food they don’t consume.
During both festivals, daily collections are also made from the VIP accommodations; on Mondays and Tuesdays, the mission collects three or four truckloads from five sections across the grounds. Vendors and caterers get a tax write-off, and the mission gets free provisions for the 1,100 daily meals it prepares for its program residents, homeless shelter clients, and anyone who shows up hungry at the door.
Those leftovers constitute the mission’s largest donation of the year, by far. It’s a lot of food, but it costs more for providers to return than to donate.
“That’s how we feed our residents through the summer,” says Erin Jones, the mission’s food service manager. “It’s closed cases, it’s never been touched. It lasts us four to five months. And it’s good quality stuff.”
Food collected in 2024 from one section alone weighed in at 56,086 pounds. Among the raw materials for eventual rescue mission meals were three cases of soy milk, 22 boxes of oregano, seven pans of cauliflower, and four pans of bread pudding.
“We get pallets of cooking oil because they need it to fill their fryers, and they don’t know how much they’ll need,” Burke adds. “They don’t take anything back with them … meat, vegetables, fruit, snacks, soda, water. Whatever you can think of as food, we get it.”
Except for beer. Tequila. You know. It’s a rescue mission, not a bar.
“Usually, we end up with at least five pallets of french fries,” Jones notes, which are otherwise difficult for the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission to get because they don’t fit into a tight budget that must support nutritional requirements.
One welcome surprise was more than 400 pounds of filet mignon from a VIP tent catered by Ruth’s Chris. Thanks to a diminishing shelf life, Jones recalls, “We were creating beef stew out of filet mignon. We were creating anything we could think of with filet mignon.”
A less welcome surprise, says Burke, was “those big green things with the bumps all over them that stink really bad.” It was durian fruit, whose fragrance was described by Anthony Bourdain as akin to leaving a dead body out in the sun.
Notable individuals who have graced the mission’s kitchen with ingredients include Guy Fieri, who donates all his sausages, and Kid Cudi, who has performed several times at Coachella and broke his foot last year jumping off the stage. In 2019, he purchased 385 chicken dinners from Popeyes, and had Postmates deliver them to the mission.
The most bewildering items mission crews ever encountered on the festival grounds weren’t edible: pasties and banana hammocks. Says Burke, “I’m not touching that.”
The Galilee Center retrieves materials left at the camping grounds — anything suitable for stocking its thrift store or giving away to the seniors, farmworkers, hotel cleaners, gardeners, day laborers, immigrants, housekeepers, and homeless folks who populate the East Valley. One Galilee program supports residents who’ve lost homes to disaster — the center provides at no cost what they need to re-home from a fire. The region’s farmworkers benefit particularly from certain festival items — tents, umbrellas, outdoor chairs.
Galilee doesn’t collect anything damaged, and most of what it finds is good stuff. People dropping four figures to fly in for the music don’t fold camp chairs into the overhead bins. On arrival, they buy them new at REI, then abandon them nearly new a few days later.
Galilee sweeps the grounds Monday mornings with a driver and four crewmembers per 17-foot truck. The drivers are paid staff, the pickers are volunteers, and the sheriff’s department sends a few such folks on work release from lowly offenses such as failing to pay their tickets.
Among the tonnage of sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, sheets, clothing, barbecues, ice chests, and cases of bottled water and soda, crews find more than the occasional recliner. Even upholstered sofas acquired, perhaps, in a noble attempt at spontaneous glamping.
The center’s yield from the three festival weekends in 2024 tipped the scales at 79,120 pounds. Most of the year, revenue at the thrift store averages $1,000 a day, but after the festivals concluded, it doubled. From 2019 through 2024, the Galilee thrift store sold nearly $70,000 worth of festival items.
In 2023, Galilee collected so many sleeping bags that it delivered a truckload to the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission, as it did last year when 12 huge bins were so full center co-founder Gloria Gomez called it a “mountain.” The center shared the bounty with other area nonprofits, including Martha’s Village & Kitchen.
Apart from cushy furniture, not much surprises Gomez. Her bewilderment comes not from stuff, but from people. “What really gets to me,” she says, “is when we see the disadvantaged people on this side, the eastern side, of the valley [versus] the other side. It has nothing to do with the festival.”
It has to do with America. “You see how the people can be very rich, and sometimes very poor. … We as an agency deal with both worlds, in a way,” she says. “The people with a lot of money, we need their help and support, and the people who have nothing need our help.” Gomez has nothing but gratitude for Goldenvoice.
The charities work in concert with other firms AEG retains. Three Squares Inc., a Santa Monica environmental consulting firm, establishes the total sustainability infrastructure and choreographs the players within it. Impact Cleaning Specialists and numerous local labor companies from Indio and Riverside clear trash and sort what they can for recycling, composting, and e-waste disposal. EcoSet, a Los Angeles–based zero-waste outfit, repurposes signage for use by the entertainment industry.
As smooth as the eco-operation is, Tierney’s job is not without surprise. Last year, a couple of vendors dutifully put the dough they did not use for their pizzas into the compost bin. But it was rising dough that hadn’t finished evolving, and the tennis-ball-sized blobs threatened to overtake their oven-like confines. Recalls Tierney, “It was like they were creating a monster out of the bins.”
