Going green… and staying green
The pandemic has forced us all to take an often uncomfortable look at our work and our lives and the impact we have on the people and world around us. There was a brief moment early on, while we were all vacillating wildly between sourdough bread and existential dread, when it looked like we were all going to disconnect from some of the trappings of the modern world and find ourselves, reconnect with nature and become award-winning gardeners. But the mounds of rubbish that continue to be abandoned in our staycation beauty spots shows how fleeting those changes are and how quickly people fall back into lazy habits. As event organisers, we need to avoid the same trap.
In events our material impact has always been alarmingly clear. It’s an unavoidable truth that events can be highly wasteful. With festivals we effectively build cities from nothing, often in the middle of nowhere, to welcome thousands to come and be experience raucously. We want these events and moments to be once in a lifetime, so by their nature we’re creating something fleeting and impermanent. The herculean effort of building these experiences is what makes festivals so transformative for audiences, but it also can’t but weigh heavily on the mind of climate-conscious organisers.
On our side is the fact that the kind of people festivals attract are often, by their nature, innovators. They’re passionate about what they create, and they’re committed to the spaces they’re building them. They’re the people who became annoyingly good at an esoteric skill in lockdown while most of us were working our way through the whole of Netflix. Couple this with audiences increasingly demanding to see your ‘green credentials’, and the shift towards sustainability at every level of an event, and the acknowledgement of this urgency, felt like it had become the norm.
That’s what was so important for us to do with Ludlow Medieval Christmas Fayre. It was so incongruous that an event that is designed to sit naturally in its perfect surroundings, bringing a piece of the past back to life to be celebrated, would also be having a negative effect on that very space. So we sought out the experts. A conversation about Cwm Harry’s amazing Zero Waste Presteigne project led to the launch of Zero Waste Events at our Ludlow event. This initially reduced the event’s number of skips from over 20 to just 3, and we’ve continued to reduce our waste footprint ever since.
And then of course, the pandemic hit. We went from a situation where you could find innovation in the format of festivals and the audience’s experience as much as in the behind the scenes world as well, to everything screeching to a halt. Once we’d taken stock, you could see this hunger to innovate sparking again in the way organisers are tackling keeping their events alive in the pandemic, whether that’s moving things online or embracing the drive-in. But sustainability MUST remain at the heart of that conversation. For the long-term survival of the industry, we have to keep an awareness of the climate crisis and a commitment to sustainability at the heart of everything we do. It’s basic future proofing. And it’s incumbent on event organisers, who always have a plan b through z for any situation, to keep the pace and keep pushing for progress. A commitment to sustainability must remain at the heart of our post-pandemic events strategies. It’s the smart thing to do and, luckily, also the popular and moral thing to do. It’s rare all three of those things align, so let’s grab the moment.
