Joe GallopVision: 2025 and Julie’s Bicycle launched a new toolkit on sustainable materials and waste management at last week’s AIF Congress in Bristol.
The free-to-access toolkit, developed by experts in waste and sustainability and supported by the industry Waste Task Force, provides step-by-step guidance and resources for those managing procurement and waste at greenfield festivals.
The guidance includes practical checklists to monitor and review actions being taken; templates for developing policies and other documents specific to festivals; and tips providing guidance on specific elements of waste management. It also gives links to other reports and learning resources that exist outside of the toolkit.
Vision: 2025 chair Chris Johnson unveiled the toolkit, followed by a 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.
AIF chair John Rostron 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.”
Phillips said, “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.”
Riach said, “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.”