This new resource condenses years of research around industry practices to give organisers a wealth of practical, easy to implement waste management processes, to help improve practices, and encourage re-use of materials and reduce waste.
Chris Johnson, Vision: 2025 Chair, unveiled the new, free-to-access toolkit, followed by an in-depth presentation by Julie’s Bicycle Project lead, Richard Phillips, and Vision: 2025’s Comms Manager Bethan Riach. The toolkit, which is part of an ongoing industry project, Towards Zero Waste Festivals, focused on improving waste management practices in the festival sector, funded by the Dixon Foundation.
The AIF Congress audience represented over 80 festivals, with over 500 professionals, gathered together at the refurbished Bristol Beacon to discuss many of the issues, challenges and opportunities they face.
John Rostron, CEO of AIF, said: “The climate emergency is an issue that our membership takes very seriously, and part of our ongoing effort revolves around helping festival promoters make their events more sustainable. We have managed numerous initiatives towards this end, such as our Drastic On Plastic and Take Your Tent Home campaigns. It’s great to have Vision: 2025 at Festival Congress this year to speak to festival organisers and offer these tools that will help reduce their carbon footprint.”
The toolkit, developed by leading experts in waste and sustainability and supported by the industry Waste Task Force, provides practical step-by-step guidance and resources for those managing procurement and waste at greenfield festivals, including:
- Practical checklists to monitor and review actions being taken
- Templates for developing policies and other documents specific to your festival
- Tips providing guidance on specific elements of waste management.
It also gives links to other useful reports and learning resources that exist outside of this toolkit.
Richard commented: “This project incorporates a huge amount of information, collected and collated through extensive collaboration across the festival sector, which reflects the strong appetite from organisers to improve sustainable practices around waste and materials use.”
The Toolkit is structured around 10 steps to better waste management. Each step details actions to be taken and links to the relevant resources, with references, to guide festivals throughout the process of managing waste, with advice on using the right resources at the right times.
Festivals can download the individual resources as separate documents online, or download the whole Toolkit as a folder containing all relevant resources to use when needed. The templates (e.g. Materials List Template) are designed as a starting point for creating each festival’s specific version.
Bethan added “There is a lot of information and background research condensed in this ‘Easy to Use’ Toolkit. We’ve been as concise as possible and hope that our approach of ‘Less Is More’, will inspire organisers to use less resources and reuse more.”
