Billie Eilish Says Music Industry Started to Become More Eco-Friendly ‘Because We Would Yell at Them'

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4 days ago

Billie Eilish has long been leading the charge against the music industry's negative impact on the environment — and in an interview on an upcoming episode of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, the singer-songwriter looks back on the positive changes she's been seeing since she started speaking up.
In an exclusive clip shared with Billboard from the singer's conversation with CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir, Eilish opens up about the culture shock of going from growing up in an eco-conscious household to becoming famous in an industry marked by overabundance and excess. Eilish's mom and fellow climate activist, Maggie Baird, also joins her for the interview.
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'We were meeting different brands, and I was going to go on tour and making perfume and my own clothing line,' Eilish recalls of the early years of her career. 'We learned how much unbelievable waste is going on that we don't really know is happening.'
'We stepped into this other world, and it was a little bit like, 'Oh my gosh, what is happening here?'' Baird added incredulously.
The mother-daughter duo go on to say that the music industry didn't have any sort of 'plan' for minimizing its eco footprint back when Eilish first found fame around 2016 — but now, they say it's changing for the better. 'You would not believe how wasteful this industry is,' the nine-time Grammy winner says in the clip. 'They then started making plans, because we would yell at them. We would demand a plan.'
'I was raised to feel this way, but I think I also have my mom's gene of really caring about the world and animals and not wasting things,' Eilish adds.
For years, the musician has been a fierce climate advocate. In addition to working with fashion brands such as Nike and Oscar de la Renta to create vegan designs and partnering with environmental nonprofit REVERB on tour, the star launched her very own climate summit, Overheated, in 2022. She's also been a key player in carrying out the initiatives of Support + Feed, an organization founded by Baird in 2020 with a mission to fight climate change and food insecurity.
Eilish and Baird's segment on The Whole Story echoes what both women previously spoke with Billboard about last year. Recalling how 'bleak' it was to take meetings with record label executives who couldn't even speak to their companies' sustainability efforts — or lack thereof — the singer pointed out how wasteful unethically sourced merchandise and album variants can be.
'It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right, and I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable,' she said at the time. 'Then it's some of the biggest artists in the world making f–king 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more.'
In that same interview with Billboard, Baird praised Universal Music Group for coming 'a long way' in its environmental practices since Eilish signed to them nearly a decade ago. The live music industry has also been making strides, from Lollapalooza implementing a battery-powered hybrid system for its main stage to Coachella debuting a zero-carbon stage in 2025.
Eilish is just one of a few musicians featured on the latest installment of The Whole Story, which will premiere at 8 p.m. ET on July 20. Titled 'Change Amplified: Live Music and the Climate Crisis,' the episode will also include first-hand accounts from Bonnie Raitt, Jack Johnson, Perry Farrell and AJR's Adam Met about how they're personally working to revolutionize the music industry's approach to environmentalism.
Watch the exclusive clip from Eilish and Baird's interview with Weir above.
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