Introducing Your Commitments

This page introduces the commitments we'll ask of you as a member of the Green Venue Initiative. Your very first step as a participating venue is to sign off on these commitments and then begin to take action.

In return, we offer staff support to help you become greener, access to deals we've arranged with green suppliers, and eligibility for our Green Venue Award, which we're planning to launch in 2012.

This webtool is here to help you meet those commitments and plan your green actions: check the Getting Started page for a full guide on how to begin.

Membership Essentials

The Membership Essentials are commitments asked of every venue that wants to join the Green Venue Initiative. These are equivalent to the criteria of Industry Green (IG) certification scheme run by our partners Julie's Bicycle, a non-profit company working across the arts and creative industries providing expertise in environmental sustainability to over 300 organisations in the UK and internationally.

Members will commit to:

  1. Taking action on climate change
  2. Understanding their environmental impact
  3. Improving their environmental performance
  4. Communicating their environmental impact and actions to others

The core of the GVI is based on reducing your venue’s production of waste and consumption of energy and water, and on encouraging staff, hiring companies and artists and audiences to change their behaviour in order to reduce the impact of their activities on the environment.

Experience shows that monitoring your environmental performance will help you to find opportunities to improve it. Advice on how to monitor your performance is found throughout the Guide, and you should find that many of these initiatives will help you achieve impact reductions in your business.

In addition, members are asked to record as much detail as possible on their energy, water and waste consumption to help measure progress. In doing so, you will almost always find new ways to reduce consumption and improve your environmental performance, financial bottom line and overall sustainability.

Festivals Edinburgh is here to help. We have a dedicated Environment Officer to assist you and hold workshops throughout the year.  Through our group of Festivals and venues we share ideas and experience, solve problems and promote best practice – but it is essential that your organisation takes the lead.

The Core Commitments

1. Leadership

The most senior person in your organisation must confirm that they lead the organisation in actively supporting the aims of the Green Venue Initiative.

2. A green champion

We ask you to identify a Green Champion (or more than one in a larger organisation) who is the key contact in your organisation and is responsible for data gathering, communication and reporting on activities and progress. The Green Champion should ideally be senior enough to make things happen and should report on progress at management meetings.

3. Monitoring accurately and recording

We will help you put in place a system for measuring and recording energy, water and waste data for the venue – even if payment for these utilities is not your organisation’s direct responsibility. In order to do this, you must:

  1. Enable your Green Champion to find out where electricity, gas and water meters are for the venue
  2. Register the venue with the SMEasure buildings energy management tool and Julie’s Bicycle’s Industry Green (IG) tools.
  3. Take and record energy meter readings when you arrive at the venue, each Monday you are in the venue and just before you leave using SMEasure
  4. Take and record water meter readings when you arrive at the venue and just before you leave, and measure and record the amount of waste recycled or disposed of during your time in the venue using the IG tool
  5. Forward this information to Festivals Edinburgh’s Environmental Officer

SMEasure is a great tool for recording and analysing buildings' weekly energy use, developed out of a research project at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, and is free to Green Venue Initiative users. Julie’s Bicycle is a not for profit organisation making environmental sustainability intrinsic to the business, art and ethics of music, theatre and the creative industries. Julie’s Bicycle and SMEasure work closely together and are helping to deliver the Green Venue Initiative. If you contact Julie's Bicycle or SMEasure please let them know you are part of the Green Venue Initiative.

4. Communicating to audiences and stakeholders

As part of the programme we ask you to communicate to staff, hiring companies, visiting artists and audiences your organisation’s commitment to the Green Venue Initiative and inform them how they can contribute to your effort. Various ways of doing this will be shared through the group.

5. Disclosing the data

You are required to disclose and share your venue’s carbon emissions, related to energy and water use, waste production and staff and volunteer travel, so that your impact reduction can be monitored and assisted if necessary. Data disclosure to audiences, staff, volunteers, visiting artists and hiring companies is also required through visible and easily understood posters and signage.