Sustainability

We use ‘Trace’ by Isla to track and report on our event carbon across the week’s curated events.
We ensure that we don’t over order catering, and we will donate any leftover food to food banks and/or recycle food waste working with local partner Gap Global anaerobic digestion plant to create biogas.
No single use plastics or any other single use materials will be used across all events and recycling points will be available at all main venues.
Signage and print is limited and will be heavily digital.
All food at curated events is vegetarian or vegetarian by default to reduce carbon.
We have chosen central locations accessible by public transport for all curated events.
We are offering zero credit Nexus ‘pop’ cards to any attendee to allow cheaper travel via public transport across Tyne & Wear.
We are encouraging fringe organisers to live steam or record and share recordings post event.

In year 1 the festival’s carbon from curated events was 35 tCO2e and we decided, as an ethical offset, to donate the equivalent carbon credit value to a North East environmental charity, Groundwork North East & Cumbria for their nature-based solutions programme.

This year we plan to reduce the carbon this year for the curated programme and we have also expanded our ask to fringe organisers to provide travel data for those attending their events to understand the scale of our impact and audience travel from the whole festival.