We weighed what left the site for four nights. The result changed how we pack, and it is feeding the ISO 20121 work.
Sustainability claims are easy to write and hard to prove, so this season we weighed everything that left one festival site: cable offcuts, scenic timber, carpet, packaging, gel, broken fixtures and general waste. Four nights of weighing produced a surprisingly useful spreadsheet.
The three biggest lines
Carpet, timber and packaging, in that order. None of them are glamorous and all three are decided at the packing stage rather than at the show. We now send builds out with returnable crates instead of cardboard, and we specify a reusable decking system rather than a single-use one.
Power and light
LED fixtures replaced the remaining discharge lamps in the festival rig this year, and generator load was logged per hour rather than per night. That log is what makes it possible to talk about consumption honestly instead of estimating it.
The intention is to formalise all of this into an ISO 20121 management system. That work is in progress: the waste log and the power log are the first two pieces, and both now travel with every show file.