- Posted on February 5th, 2024
A New Sustainable Materials and Waste Management Toolkit for Festivals
Vision: 2025 and Julie’s Bicycle have worked in partnership to develop and launch a new resource for festivals. The Toolkit 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, Chair of Vision: 2025, unveiled the new, free-to-access toolkit at AIF Congress in Bristol on 2 February. The launch was followed by an in-depth presentation by Julie’s Bicycle’s, Richard Phillips, and Vision: 2025’s 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 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.
These include:
- 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.
“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.” – JB’s Richard Phillips.“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.” – Bethan Riach, Vision: 2025.
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, toguide 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.
