How Ultra Music Festival 2025 Diverted Nearly 50 Tons of Waste From Landfill Hell

In 2019, Vivian Belzaguy Hunter sat at her desk and cried.

These tears were, in fact, joyful. Belzaguy Hunter had just learned that the event for which she runs the sustainability program, Miami’s mighty Ultra Music Festival, had gotten a glowing review from volunteercleanup.org, a local environmental organization.

In a report on the 2019 edition of Ultra, reps from volunteercleanup.org wrote that the fest “did an excellent job in reducing their landfill waste, increasing the capture of recyclable materials and engaging the attendees to protect the bay and park.” For its sustainability efforts, Ultra 2019 was given an A grade.

This success wasn’t assured. Four and a half months before the show, Ultra 2019 was forced to move from its longtime home in Miami’s Bayfront Park to Virginia Key, an environmentally sensitive island that’s home to a rich ecosystem of endangered and threatened species. A flurry of local organizations, volunteercleanup.org included, publicly opposed Ultra — with its tens of thousands of ravers in tow — moving to the site.

Belzaguy Hunter understood why. She’d spent the last few years working on sustainability efforts for a smaller electronic festival on Virginia Key, and in 2019 was asked to take the lead on an environmental plan for Ultra’s debut at the site — efforts required by local government in order for the fest to happen there.

“As a person protecting that park, I was opposed to it,” she says. “Then somebody told me, ‘Maybe you’re the one who needs to help them; you’re the perfect person to do it.’ That changed my mindset.” She accepted a position as head of the program, called Mission: Home.

Local organizations requested 13 initiatives that Ultra would do for environmental protection. The team delivered 20, focusing on reducing single-use plastics, incorporating recycling and leaving no trace on the island. The team did such a thorough deep clean that they got rid of debris that had been on Virginia Key since the 1970s.

While Ultra ultimately returned to Bayfront Park, after 2019, the festival’s leadership decided to make sustainability a priority. “Once we saw how amazingly this went in a super challenging and short timeframe,” Belzaguy Hunter says, “we wondered what we could do if we had a year to plan.”

Six years later, she knows. While Ultra Miami didn’t happen in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, since 2022 (with 2019 stats included), Mission: Home has diverted 394,000 pounds of waste from landfills over the festival’s three days. At Ultra Miami’s most recent edition in March, the program diverted 96,537 pounds of waste, recycled more than 31,000 pounds of materials and saved nearly 19,000 pounds of usable food and beverages from going to waste. (Diversion refers to when waste that would have gone to landfill goes somewhere else, whether donated for reuse, repurposed, recycled, composted, etc.) 

While most attendees at the festival are not likely to be deeply considering sustainability while they rave, under the radar, the Mission: Home team is making Ultra one of the most sustainable festivals in the industry. Its whopping sustainability stats are a function of Mission Home’s focus on waste reduction, a core principle of the program alongside pollution prevention, nature preservation, climate action and community engagement.

“Waste is a thing we can all see is a problem,” Belzaguy Hunter says. “It’s a physical thing that actually affects the customer experience. To me, there’s nothing worse than going to a festival and not being able to dance because there’s trash everywhere.” More practically, significant progress can be made in waste reduction, given the number of strategies that exist to take it on.

For Mission Home, the first strategy is source reduction — eliminating items that aren’t truly necessary at the event. “You do not need straws,” says Belzaguy Hunter, “especially at a festival of this scale, there’s no reason to be giving out 100,000 straws a day.”

It’s not just a polite suggestion. Single-use plastics like cutlery, sauce tubs and plastic bottles containing anything other than water and sports drinks are banned at Ultra Miami, and vendors are contractually obligated not to bring them. “After three warnings, we will kick you out if you bring things to the festival that you’re not supposed to bring,” Belzaguy Hunter says. Styrofoam is also not allowed. (The only other single-use plastic allowed is a very limited number of champagne flutes in table service areas, as the team hasn’t yet found a sustainable alternative.)

Additionally, all materials brought onsite by food vendors and intended to be distributed to attendees must be able to be composted by backyard composting standards, as opposed to composting in an industrial composting facility. (To wit, many of the compostable plastic cups used by festivals are in reality only compostable at such industrial facilities, and thus often end up in landfills.) Instead, bars and other vendors use paper cups.

Belzaguy Hunter says many of these requirements are easy to get buy-in on, given that vendors save money by not purchasing prohibited items. “Sustainability consultants and managers often struggle with, ‘How do I get people to agree to do this?’” she says. “It’s like, ‘Well, save them money.’”

Mission: Home estimates that since 2019, in terms of beverage-specific waste alone, it’s avoided the use of 985,000 plastic cups, 1.2 million plastic bottles and 450,000 plastic straws, adding up to 2.6 million plastic items.   

The eradication of plastic is especially crucial given Bayfront Park’s location on, as the name indicates, Biscayne Bay. The festival would pose a great ecological risk if tons of plastic from the event ended up in the water, endangering animals and spreading microplastics. The Park also has bountiful trees and is home to wildlife like birds, squirrels and reptiles, “so my number one priority is making sure I’m not leaving a physical impact on this place,” says Belzaguy Hunter.

Crucially, since 2019, Mission: Home has partnered with Clean Vibes, a North Carolina-based company that responsibly handles on-site waste management for outdoor festivals and events. In operation since 1997, Clean Vibes has partnered with dozens of large and small-scale festivals around the country, including Electric Forest, Outside Lands and Bourbon & Beyond. The organization oversees Ultra’s waste management, from the robust recycling and composting programs to other waste diversion streams, which now include food and beverages, wood, furniture, miscellaneous supplies, glass, compost, soft plastic and cooking oil.

“When we first started working Ultra in 2019, we had numerous people laugh at us when we said we were going to recycle at a large event in Miami,” says Clean Vibes owner/manager Anna Borofsky. “They told us no one can successfully get people to recycle in Miami. We were very proud to prove them wrong, and to continue to prove them wrong year after year while helping the sustainability program continue to grow and evolve.”  

She adds that Ultra distinguishes itself from other festivals that Clean Vibes partners with by “ensuring that all staff on site help participate in our efforts.”

It was Clean Vibes that first alerted Belzaguy Hunter and her team that furniture from the VIP areas had landed in the trash. Now, this furniture — typically just lightly used — is picked up by people and organizations who can give it a new home. 

In 2025 alone, more than 29,000 pounds of wood, which largely comes from structures like the VIP areas and art pieces, was rescued or recycled. Beyond such sorting and moving of materials, the Clean Vibes team — which can be as large as 200 people during Ultra — also does a comprehensive deep clean of the Park, picking up trash and ensuring even the tiniest bits of litter are properly disposed of. 

Of all the waste diversion streams, however, Belzaguy Hunter’s favorite is the food and beverage rescue. The team realized the opportunity here in 2019, when the composting team told them that a lot of completely edible food landed in the composting stream.

“That broke my heart,” says Belzaguy Hunter. “But it was like, ‘That’s our priority for next year.”  
Since 2021, Ultra Miami has donated 65,000 pounds of food and beverages to Miami Rescue Mission, which provides food, shelter, substance use treatment, education, job placement and more to unhoused Miami residents. These donations begin on the first day of load-in and end when load-out is complete.

In partnership with CES Power, the program has also consulted with Showpower, the company that’s worked with Coldplay to transition their touring to clean battery power, to shift three of its stages to grid power, eradicating the need for carbon-spitting diesel generators. (Such generators are kept at these stages as backups, in case of a power outage.)

Altogether, Mission: Home encompasses 61 initiatives, with roughly 10 programs operating under each core focus. (The many editions of Ultra that happen around the world are put on by local producers with their own sustainability plans.) With a strong focus on community engagement, Mission: Home hosts shoreline cleanups, fundraisers for local non-profits and a long-term “leave no trace” campaign that educates those involved with the festival, from vendors to fans. Each year, the festival has an “eco village” area populated by booths from climate action organizations that share information and volunteer opportunities. At this year’s festival, attendees could write the name of a place in nature that’s special to them and pin it to a board alongside the names of other attendees’ special spots.

Belzaguy Hunter got started in the events industry 20 years ago, with her initial jobs focused on event marketing and production. Over time, sustainability became more important to her, which led to a feeling of disconnection when she saw heaps of waste at events.

“It really started to shock me,” she says. “Like, what is the point of me trying to do things on my own when here I am at an event creating way more impact in a day than I could in my lifetime?”

She eventually left her jobs, trained with Australia’s Sustainable Events Alliance and started consulting at events around Miami to gain experience, joining Ultra in 2019. As the festival’s director of sustainability, she works with three other people and an annual intern, emphasizing that programs like Mission: Home don’t really work without a dedicated team.

Her dedication has not only diverted millions of pounds of waste from landfills but has earned global accolades. In 2023, Mission: Home won a World Sustainability Award, a distinction that identifies leaders and companies from across industries that make sustainability core to their endeavors. This award followed Mission: Home being named the most extensive sustainability program among large-scale U.S. electronic music festivals by Debris Free Oceans in 2022, the same year it also became the first music festival of its scale in the United States to earn 2-star verification from Oceanic Global, an ocean protection organization.

Clearly, Mission: Home is doing something worth replicating, and something that can be achieved by any given event identifying its sustainability goals and putting a team and resources behind them. “See where you feel like you have an opportunity,” she says, “and take action.”