Read our latest Sustainability update blog from our Green Champion, Zoe…
Grow in the Garden, our early years show performed to almost 1000 children over 17 performances in July – it’s been so lovely to see them enjoy the performance and feel inspired about what they can do to help the environment!
‘We can look after our world by caring for the plants’ – Grow in the Garden Audience member
‘Rubbish can go into the sea, we should put it in the bin’ – Grow in the Garden Audience member
Remounting Grow in the Garden has meant that we can take the show out of the original inflatable dome, reducing our emissions by getting rid of the need for a generator and electricity. It has also been redesigned to fit into our van, with room for the team to travel with the show. Grow in the Garden has achieved Theatre Green Book basic standard, with 54% of costumes, set and props recycled or made of recycled materials and 96% stored for a future tour. Most of the performers are based locally, with our one artist choosing to travel from a distance via train, which helps reduce our carbon impact.
We have signed up to the West Midlands Net Zero business pledge, and had our application accepted! This now means we can access some of their resources to help us on our journey.
We have started working with You.Smart.Thing, a map-based travel assistant which can help our audiences and participants navigate to our base, workshops and performances and offering them the lowest carbon emitting route. This also means we can gather more data about how our audiences are travelling to see or participate in our work.
We are sending out our Green Rider (thanks to Lorna Rees’ for the template) alongside our touring performances packs this summer for Accelerate and CastAway.
Our Youth Advisory Board have reviewed our action plan for 2025/26 and made a number of suggestions and comments, including telling us about windows at school that open automatically based on room temperature, and raising the fact that Sprung Youth seem to be using a lot of disposable water bottles – we will be starting a campaign in September to encourage the use of reusable bottles instead. One YAB group member noted that there has to be a line between what is sustainable environmentally and financially viable, and our action plan seems to tread that line very well– Great news! A number of the YAB are also members of Sprung Youth and recognised many reused set and costume pieces as part of the Physical Fellowship this year.
Over the next few months, some of the core and associate team are undergoing Carbon Literacy training to help support our sustainability journey.
I’ve already started with the small habits for a digital declutter – when I open a promotional email or newsletter, if I don’t ever read it, I am unsubscribing, and if I’ve read it and don’t need to keep a copy, I’m deleting it straight away! I’m going to be sharing this at our next team away day to hopefully get everyone in the habit.
In terms of the Theatre Green Book, we have also assessed our new show Simile (touring in 2026), which has been designed to fit into one LWB crew van, along with the cast & crew, to reduce emissions on tour, as well as choosing durable materials for the set for longevity and to enable us to reuse for a variety of other performances.
We have surpassed the target for reuse, with 100% of set and costumes to be stored for reuse and future tour, and the large-scale wooden boxes purchased already in use as part of the Physical Fellowship set, although not quite achieving TGB Basic for sourcing costume and set (sourcing 14% of costume and 21% of set & props second-hand).
The Physical Fellowship easily achieved Intermediate Standard, with 93% of our costume/set reused or recycled, and 100% destined for storage for future reuse. Although we bought some costumes new (T-shirts and Trousers), these were made of 25% recycled cotton (T-shirts), and 51% recycled polyester (trousers) helping to reduce our footprint. We also made use of local connections and borrowed the chairs used for the set from BCU. As we are not venue based, we used a West Midlands based lighting company to hire any lighting we need to use additional to the Belgrade’s existing kit.
The plan for the next few months?
- Getting to grips with increasing our recycling in the office, looking particularly at the soft plastics like those that wrap biscuits (an absolute requirement for a board meeting!)
- Team away day, for training and to collaborate on implementing our action plan
- As we head into a new term, gathering travel data from our Sprung Youth participants.