Issue 57

EVENTS
Sustainability
in the Field
Walk the Plank has released its
sustainability report detailing learnings
from the production of the award winning
creative project, Green Space Dark Skies
GREEN SPACE Dark Skies (GSDS) was an
ambitious collaborative project produced
by Walk the Plank and commissioned by
UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK in 2022. The
project put environmental sustainability
at its heart, achieving some major
sustainability successes and impressive
carbon savings. Walk the Plank is now
releasing the report to share this best
practice with organisations delivering
outdoor events. GSDS won the National
Outdoor Events Association Sustainability
Award in 2022.
Green Space Dark Skies took thousands
of people into National Parks and Areas of
Outstanding Natural Beauty to create largescale
temporary artworks with new Geolight
technology, which was captured on film.
To meet the challenge of climate change,
Green Space Dark Skies employed a
collective and collaborative approach. The
open sharing of knowledge and experience
was vital to establishing a new working
culture where sustainability was as central to
the event production as health and safety.
Green Space Dark Skies as a large-scale
national project provided the resources and
partners to embed sustainability from the
planning, delivery and measurement stages
towards achieving ambitious targets across
both the social and environmental aspects of
the project. The scope of data collection was
vast including energy, transport, materials,
food and beverage, waste, accessibility,
diversity and digital. The aims were to leave
no trace and be climate positive, ultimately
removing more carbon from the atmosphere
than the event produced.
The report contains the carbon data for
the entire project, shares learnings and
innovations gathered on the way and does
not shy away from some of the challenges
faced.
The greatest carbon savings were from
participants (known as Lumenators) or staff
and crew using coaches instead of individual
car journeys (47.23 tCO2e), vegetarian
meals instead of meat (approximately 25-30
tCO2e), and choosing hotels with green
energy tariffs (16.3 tCO2e).
HIGHLIGHTS
› 50/50 split of vegetarian and meat meals
overall
› 71% of suppliers came from within 50
miles
› 13 of the 19 events used over 80%
renewable energy
› 81% of Lumenators shared transport
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