The Sydney Festival is once again up and running, with the festival first night last Saturday putting on a super start to it all. But behind the lights and action and awesome tunes there are some sustainability initiatives and events worth some notice!

The festival’s aim is to be the most sustainable major performing arts festival in Australia – and while as always with such big awesome goals, there are many steps to be taken and things to be learned – the essence of positive plans and foresight are in place already.  The 2012 Sydney Festival will be the year on which a full diagnostic of the event’s impact on the environment is measured. The full diagnostic is planned (with the help of Greenshoot Pacific), so as to allow long term target setting, progress monitoring and a strong move towards compliance with the soon to be implemented international standard, ISO 20121 Events Sustainability Management Systems.

The Sydney Festival estimates its audiences to be around 650,000 across 30 venues with a multitude of performances by over 1000 artists. So clearly, it’s not a small affair by any means – and it’s growing annually. One can only begin to imagine the impact that even 10,000 people packing the domain for a free event can have in terms of waste production! Waste creation, transportation and emissions are the areas that the festival wants to focus on, and establish meaningful reductions in.

Collaborative and engaged relationships with artists, venues, suppliers, staff, crew, volunteers, audiences and corporate partners will help spread their aims across all arms of the festival. The Sydney Festival has partnered this year with Unilever as their Sustainability Partner – a collaboration which will allow them to start measuring the festival’s impacts and management processes.

Small Actions, big differences- this is the foundation of Unilever’s approach to sustainability, and it’s a simple and effective way for individuals and businesses to think about why they should be making positive changes in the way they exist. Little by little, small things combine and build up, to eventually create something big, to create an absolutely essential movement of change. Unilever is a huge business, which has obvious impacts on the environment, but they’ve been beavering away at trying to find ways to initiate change, and have recently launched their Sustainable Living Plan. The plan outlines their commitment to developing new ways of doing business that will ‘halve its environmental impact whilst increasing its positive social impacts.’

The Sydney Festival is such a huge part of Sydney’s calendar, and particularly of the summer season, so it’s particularly great to see them embracing better ways of living and doing business. While it’s only the beginning, we hope to see even bigger changes and goals for the festival in 2013! In the meantime, you can check out a couple of the sustainable events happening in and around the multitude of other great stuff going on over the next few weeks!

Thanks to Unilever for providing the great graphics!

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About the author

Lara Ihnatowicz

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