Event Industry News: Events have incredible power to positively impact the lives of their attendees, but their temporary nature and millions of visitors per year inherently drive wastefulness. We are running out of space and time to tackle this problem – our landfills, in the UK and globally, have rapidly dwindling capacity which experts predict could be exceeded within the next decade. The current state of the industry and the complex challenges of achieving zero-waste pose the question: Could our events ever truly be waste-free?
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When I participated in my first set build I remember painting this massive stained glass window for a musical. Then it came time for the strike and I asked my teacher where do we keep all of this stuff when we were done with it. He pointed to a dumpster that had been rolled up to the stage doors and I was flabbergasted. Even to this day I still sort of can't fathom the amount that entertainment (theater especially in my case) creates. That is the primary reason why I clicked on this article to read in the first place. I am always super curious as to how leading people in the industry are trying to reframe the way we think and deal with our waste in the entertainment industry. I think it's a good sign that I am seeing more and more of these types of articles floating around on here as well as more conversation in general within the industry.
Live entertainment as an industry is very wasteful. However, this article argues that this could be changed if as an industry, we decided to make tangible efforts to reduce waste. However, I don’t believe that this is something that could be feasible. All of the solutions proposed by this article are either incredibly costly, time consuming, or are not feasible for other reasons. Things in the live entertainment industry happen so quickly and on such tight budgets that adding in the procedures needed to make change happen would be wildly impractical if not impossible for most companies. On top of this, the article did not even talk about another big reason why live entertainment creates so much waste, physical design elements. After a show closes, a not insignificant amount of the sets, props, and costumes become waste. Finding ways to recycle these things in many cases would take way too much time or add way too much of an expense to a show’s operating budget to make it possible. I do hope that one day we find a solution but I am sadly not optimistic about it.
This article addresses an important concern for not just the entertainment industry but humanity as a whole. The numbers this article provides, mostly for concerts and festivals in the UK, are scary, though I would bet that the data for theaters in the United States are worse. Concerts, particularly outdoor concerts, really are a wasteful process. It’s crazy how much trash can be left behind, but even the trash that’s disposed of properly is still waste. This article makes some really good insights into strategies that can be employed to reduce waste, but I think it will be difficult for the industry to adopt any major changes. At the end of the day, the most effective solutions come at the cost of money. I suspect it’s the same with theater – there are definitely ways to reduce environmental impact (see Love and Money), but they all come at the of cash, in one way or another.
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