Billie Eilish has a lot of credibility as an artist who is actively trying to find solutions to environmental issues. She’s not calling herself an environmentalist and just leaving it to other people to do the heavy lifting – Billie has made big changes to how an artist can tour and what can be done industry-wide to reduce waste. She’s also done smaller-scale things, like using her celebrity to get designers to focus more on not using fur or leather, and creating more “vegan fashion” for all of her red carpets. Billboard did an interview with Billie and her mom, and you can read the long list of initiatives pioneered by Billie as a touring artist. Interestingly, Billie took some well-deserved swipes at other artists who do “wasteful” album-drops:

Billie on being very particular about her merch: “It’s about how it feels and how it looks and how it’s made. And so the problem is to make sure that my clothing is being made well and ethically and with good materials and it’s very sustainable and that it feels good and is durable. It’s going to be more expensive and that’s the thing: People can be upset by that. But I’m trying to pick one of two evils.

She’s reduced the number of merch drops too: “Sometimes people have the idea of when things are more ethical, they’re more expensive, and so it’s harder to be plant-based or environmentally conscious if you don’t have as much money. That’s the whole system we live in, of like, if you have less money then you have less resources [for] healthier food… And so what we’re trying to do is make it more universally accessible.

She’s working to make vinyl more sustainable. Happier Than Ever came in eight vinyl variants, using 100% recycled black vinyl — plus recycled scraps for colored variants — and shrink-wrap made from sugar cane. “We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more… I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. 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 — and 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. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that sh-t.

[From Billboard]

“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. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that sh-t.” Page Six has already described this as Billie taking a very specific swipe at Taylor Swift, and I’ll admit, Taylor is who I thought of first. Other artists do multiple vinyl packages as well, but Taylor has become infamous for squeezing every dollar she can from her fans through multiple drops of the same f–king album. I always came at that issue as “a sucker born every minute, Taylor really doesn’t respect her fans,” but Billie is coming at the issue as: that’s so wasteful, why are you creating forty unique vinyl packages for your fans to buy when you could just do one or two packages?

Update: After this Billboard piece was published, Billie later said that she wasn’t calling out one specific person and especially not Taylor. It’s true that she didn’t name names and she was speaking in the broader sense that many artists do it. Artists like Taylor.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.