Year on year at bluedot we work closely with our friends at Jodrell Bank exploring how sustainability plays a central role in our work across the festival and beyond. Through ways in which we could make sustainable developments at the festival through our production, resources and much more, to science stalls and inviting leading scientists and thinker to come and discuss the latest research about our planet and everything that inhabits it.

From being one of the first festivals in the UK to use all LED festoon lighting in our inaugral year, to using a vast 15 acre wildlife refuge as our home at Jodrell Bank, both us and the team at the Observatory work hard to reduce waste and minimise our carbon footprint at the festival.

While we work hard to put sustainability at the heart of festival production, a key part of our overarching public mission is ‘to highlight the fragility of planet Earth.’

Our initatives include:

• Offering the audience a chance to offset their carbon footprint with a choice to make a ‘Carbon Offset’ donation when they buy their tickets. We invest 100% of this in renewable energy with Energy Revolution, a festival industry collaborative charity.
• Removing the use of plastic straws, plastic containers and plastic cutlery sold from food traders.
• Providing all staff with reusable bottles to reduce the number of plastic bottles on site.
• Initiate car sharing schemes and providing coaches for festival-goers to arrive together.
• Providing extensive recycling opportunities across the festival site.
• Offering tent collections for charity and an onsite local food back collection.
• Campsite crew are on hand to encourage campers to recycle correctly with recycling bin bags, keeping our campsites clean and removing all tents when the festival has ended.

This year we’re also:

• Working alongside the AIF to ban single-use plastics at the festival.
• All food waste will be split from other waste across the site, to then be composted.
• After giving our audience the chance to offset their carbon footprint, we’re also giving our staff, contractors and artists the opportunity to do the same with Energy Revolution.
• Frank Water will be onsite offering a water refill service with freshly chilled, filtered water.
• Encouraging our festival goers to bring their own refillable water bottle for use onsite.
• Alternative sustainable power supplies brought onsite to replace diesel generators in some areas.
• All onsite water sales will be in the form of Can O Water instead of single use plastic water bottles.
• Roaming as well as static water refill stations encouraging festival goers to refill instead of purchasing water.

Our team have worked hard over the past few months to confirm that 0% of our waste will be going to landfill.

Incorporating sustinability into our programme is also key for us at bluedot. Our Planet Field focuses on ‘spaceship Earth’ and the ways in which we look after the only planet we can call our home. Located in The Arboretum, discover the latest thinking and innovation in how researchers and scientists are working to protect our pale blue dot.

We’ve incorporated a range of DotTalks, stalls, live science shows and performance into the programme exploring the sustainability topic further. This includes:

• Met Office’s Richard Betts discusses the temperature of our planet and the effects it could have on our future on Earth in Overheating the Pale Blue Dot: How Much Climate Change Can We Take?
• Future Now – Rebuilding: Future Cities raises important questions about the future of our planet, shedding lights on the importance of creating sustainable living through design.
• Live science show: Operation Earth
• Exhibitor: Ocean Science, Society and Robots
• Exhibitor: Practical Action
• Exhibitor: The Carbon Impact of our Lifestyles
• Performance: ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Theatre Production
• Tamsin Edwards, lecturer with the Open University in Environmental Sciences and a defining voice in the climate change debate, joins us for her DotTalk delving deeper into beauty, contradictions and surprises of ice and fire in the natural world in Language of Ice and the Fingerprints of Fire.
• Biologist and conservationist Dave Goulson explores the importance of bumblebees and the impacts their extinction would have on the future of Earth in his DotTalk Saving Our Bumblebees.