The Stage

Theatre tackles the green role

Published Friday 1 July 2011 at 11:37 by Sian Alexander

As venues examine their money-saving options, Sian Alexander of Julie’s Bicycle, a non-profit company working with the arts and creative industries to reduce their environmental impact, investigates the progress being made

It is almost exactly a year since Julie’s Bicycle launched its UK-wide programme to help theatre reduce its environmental impact. It has been an uncertain time. It’s 13 months since the coalition formed, eight months since the Comprehensive Spending Review, and just 13 weeks since the biggest arts council portfolio review in recent memory. We are operating in a context of cuts and shifting policy.

The Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency legislation has changed from an incentive to a tax collected by the Treasury, and subsidies and feed-in tariffs for micro-generation are operating within a volatile financial framework. Conversely, the government’s recent carbon budget sets increasingly stringent targets for carbon reduction, science is regaining its authority, and the imperative to negotiate an effective successor to the Kyoto Protocol at Rio in June 2012 is urgent. Making informed strategic decisions in this context is not easy.

And yet the UK theatre industry has taken decisive action to understand and reduce its environmental impact, recognising this as a critical business issue.

More than 300 UK cultural venues are measuring and sharing environmental data using free online tools supplied by JB, providing a critical mass of intelligence on the environmental performance of our industry. These Industry Green tools - tailored for venues, festivals, offices and touring - provide annual snapshots of environmental performance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions from energy, water, waste, staff and audience travel.

This has had two outcomes. JB has been able to establish a baseline for energy use and quantify the potential savings available to the sector. Based on an energy spend of £370 million by the performing arts sector between 2012 and 2015, we project available savings of £35 million across this period, of which £8 million can be made by the theatre sector alone. This can be achieved relatively straightforwardly, with savings of 8% to 10% year on year through behavioural change and investments with short payback periods. Even more compellingly, these savings are based conservatively on today’s energy prices, which will rise - theatres are reporting quotes of 15% to 30% increases from their suppliers. So, the savings could be even greater.

Secondly, we now have a statistically significant data set for UK cultural venues, and are working with the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers to improve the benchmarks used by government to assess the environmental performance of theatres. We’ll be announcing new national benchmarks later this summer.

More than 50 venues have taken their work further, setting energy reduction targets of 10% for this year. Many are using JB’s Industry Green Certification which assesses activity under four principles - commitment, understanding, improvement and communication. A one, two or three-star certification is awarded for proven achievements across all four principles and for exceptional practice. Among the leaders in this work is the Ambassador Theatre Group and the 12 venues of the London Theatre Consortium, which include the Royal Court, Young Vic, Lyric Hammersmith, Bush and Battersea Arts Centre.

So what are UK venues doing in practice, and what kind of results are they getting?

Sage Gateshead has invested in front of house LED bulbs, new air conditioning filters and better control of its heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and encouraged behavioural shifts by introducing switch-off campaigns for lights and appliances, ‘no lift’ and ‘leave your car at home’ days. It achieved a 44% drop in electricity and 28% drop in gas use per performance in its first year, and a further 9% fall in overall energy use the following year.

The Royal Court invested in its building management system and recouped the cost through reduced electricity use within three years. All 35 Ambassador Theatre Group venues across the UK are measuring and sharing their energy data. The Comedy Theatre has completed Industry Green certification as a pilot for the group and Milton Keynes Theatre has changed all front of house lights to LED.

The National Theatre worked with Philips to update its external lighting to LED, reducing electricity consumption by 70%. Further savings have been made internally by switching off rigs and discharge lights between the final check and the half hour call. Lamp life has increased from ten weeks to 17.

Nationwide, theatres now switch off bar fridges overnight, saving £150 per fridge per year.

But it’s not just venues that are taking action. Touring companies have begun to measure touring impacts and to adopt, as recommended by the Theatrical Management Association, the JB Green Rider which encourages an industry-wide shift in expectations between venues and companies. Last month, designers, directors and production managers came together to debate the roles and responsibilities of those involved in making work and to identify greener production practices including those in design, lighting technologies, set reuse and recycling.

What underpins all this work is an understanding of the mutual benefit to be gained by working together, a generosity in sharing ideas, quick wins and challenges, and a proactive approach to joint problem-solving. More and more organisations are coming together to provide mutual support and to work on joint projects that would be beyond the scope of individual organisations. Examples include the newly formed Manchester Environmental Forum, the Theatres Trust Ecovenue programme, Creative Carbon Scotland and the London Theatre Consortium.

The JB Green Theatre Network is based on this premise and provides an online forum for discussion and information exchange with members from across the UK, and internationally. Discussions underway include the best green lighting technologies, tips for greener touring, and taming your building management system.

So, what is next? The theatre industry has moved rapidly in a year to transform how environmental sustainability, particularly carbon reduction, is managed and to make this a central issue for our future. We have set the bar. Now we need to raise it.

In the second year, we want all theatre organisations to embed carbon reduction practices and join the UK-wide project to share best practice with colleagues. Julie’s Bicycle will be extending its range of tools and resources, including a new IG tool for production and a guide for the outdoor arts sector. We will work with training bodies to support professional development and embed the right skills for sustainable theatre in the future. The UK is viewed as an international leader in this field so we’ll be extending our international partnerships. A key principle of all our work is to encourage collective action to address the most important issues and we will be launching a number of industry-wide campaigns to encourage specific unilateral actions, informed by scientific research and understanding of our impacts.

And finally we want to encourage a new focus on what theatre will look like in the next five to ten years and beyond. We aim to enable the sector to understand our volatile operating context, to think about how we can best operate in a low carbon economy, and to plot a practical route for our industry. We are planning, for example, a guide to future energy supply for the sector - including retrofitting, microgeneration and community energy solutions - and the implications for our business models.

All in all, the achievements of the past year show just what UK theatre can do when it puts its mind to it, and it’s a real and welcome contribution to environmental sustainability. The work goes on though, as it must, if we want theatre to find a way to thrive in a new, low carbon world. But, on the evidence to date, we are very well placed to get there.

• Sian Alexander is associate director of theatre at Julie’s Bicycle. For free tools and resources to help your organisation reduce its environmental impact, visit www.juliesbicycle.com. To join the Green Theatre Network visit http://juliesbicycle.ning.com