A personal perspective from Tracey Rawling Church:
Massive Attack has been one of my favourite bands for many years, so I was excited to hear that they were planning ACT 1.5, the lowest carbon event of its size ever staged, on Clifton Down in Bristol over Bank Holiday weekend 2024. My colleague Paul Ducker has been working with Reading’s festival organisers and its wider culture sector to help reduce the environmental impact of local events and so I hoped to bring back some learnings could share. There are already some initiatives in this area – Julie’s Bicycle, Climate Live and Vision 25 are just some of those already striving to improve environmental standards at live music events. Massive Attack has been campaigning on climate change, among other issues, for a quarter of a century and had already commissioned a Super-low Carbon Live Music roadmap with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in 2019. It was clear that the band had high ambitions and had developed a an approach that focused on four primary impact areas – infrastructure, power, transport and food – addressed through 25 specific measures detailed in this write up by Access All Areas.
My first challenge was how to get there and back by public transport. With the event scheduled to end at 10.15 and Network Rail’s bank holiday Sunday timetable ending at 10.30 there was no chance of catching both the whole gig and a train home. A partnership with Trainhugger chartered additional late trains leaving Bristol at 11.30pm and provided free electric shuttle buses to and from the event (and an exclusive bar on site) for those who used them – however, that would only get me as far as Swindon. Anybody travelling by train back to London would have had to leave Bristol before Massive Attack even began their set. No parking was provided for the event – not even for those with limited mobility as far as I could see – and for those not using the event-specific trains there were separate electric bus transfers available for a fee. I heard some gripes about the wait times for buses back to the station after the gig, but on the whole this seemed like an impressively holistic approach to incentivising rail travel over car. The additional rail routes were apparently predicated on anonymised ticket holder postcodes, so perhaps Massive Attack’s home audience skewed the data, but a wider geographic reach would be needed for this approach to be fully scalable.
My second challenge was getting something to eat. All catering on site was plant-based with the emphasis on local supply chains, a bold move that didn’t seem to faze the audience. But the number of food outlets was insufficient for the 30,000 crowd and wait time became excessive as well as causing congestion with queues snaking across the area immediately in front of the stage. The organisers had specifically banned bringing in food, which added to the demand exceeding supply. While I understand the intention to reduce waste generated on site by avoiding people bringing in non-compostable food packaging, banning own food prohibits the low-cost option of bringing a packed lunch and risks excluding those for whom incidental costs are a disincentive. The bars, on the other hand, were large and well staffed, serving local brands mostly in cans and charging £1 for a re-usable cup for those who didn’t bring their own; there were well-signed drinking water points alongside the 100% compostable toilets. It was refreshing to see people using the segregated waste bins, bins regularly emptied and little rubbish left on the ground at the end of the event.
Perhaps the most remarkable innovation was the complete absence of diesel generators – the entire event was run on 100% renewable energy and from batteries, avoiding 2,000 litres of diesel and 5.3 tonnes of carbon emissions. Build emissions had been almost eliminated by re-using the infrastructure of a previous event on the same site, and supplier transport was 100% electrified or 100% waste product-powered, with a refuelling tank on site for vehicle departures. Even the acts were encouraged to travel by train – although presumably this didn’t apply to US-based Killer Mike. The event’s legacy includes development of power substation and feeder pillars to offer all future festival, event, show and film production activities on Bristol Downs electrification via 100% renewable energy as well as adding new vehicle charging capacity. And to help offset unavoidable emissions, a new, permanent climate resilient woodland of 19,150 native oak trees will be planed near Taunton, comprising 85 acres of former farmland and unmanaged woodland and providing education, carbon capture, flood resilience and a rich area of biodiversity.
The same weekend, back in my hometown, Reading Festival was creating a sea of abandoned tents and discarded waste while volunteers did their best to salvage usable items to help the unhoused and refugees. Sustainable events are inevitably a partnership between the organisers who provide the infrastructure and facilities and the audience which co-operates with the system they have created. Massive Attack’s reputation for political campaigning (also evidenced by the platform provided for talks on climate change, capitalism, Gaza and black history in Bristol) no doubt meant that the crowd was broadly supportive of its aims and enabled its ambitions for Act 1.5 to be realised. Festivals with like-minded audiences – WOMAD, for example, where the batteries used for Act 1.5 had previously powered its Charlie Gillett stage and where the only evidence left behind on its campsites are patches of flattened grass – could probably achieve similar results. But to roll out Act 1.5 principles to all outdoor music events would require unprecedented culture change from audiences, which is another challenge entirely.
If you were there, we’d love to hear your views.
