Reviewing our environmental impact
Following Graeme's post on the carbon emissions produced by burning our temple and effigy, here's a thread to discuss the wider issue of environmental impact and LNT at Nest.
This is a place to start throwing ideas around - what do we do well as a community? How could we improve? How does this vary from individual participants to theme camps, artists, the core team etc? Where do we go from here? Advise away x
Tom Allen Tue 18 Jun 2019 4:04PM
i do EIA for events, and i can tell you, transport is always the number one by a huge margin. it only takes a few people to fly in to outweigh EVERYTHING on site
Paul Phare Tue 9 Apr 2019 9:39AM
You missed out one of our biggest environmental footprints after transport which is burning deisel to generate electrciity. An easy win here would be to burn bio-deisel. I've also got an idea to bring batteries to site that have been charged at a solar farm, maybe even a community owned one and run the grid off them for a week. One for the future I think!
Ashley Wed 10 Apr 2019 4:32PM
Is connecting to grid electricity for the duration of the event a viable option at all?
Paul Phare Wed 10 Apr 2019 5:40PM
we have considered that with the landowner. The size of the cable you would need to run from his house would be massive. Not impossible and he is open to it. He has solar panels onsite too so that would be a lower carbon option than generators
Chris Mon 13 May 2019 9:43PM
Love the idea of a battery farm or anything other than diesel generators. I would love to hear a little less generator rumble and a little more nature.
Adrian Godwin Tue 14 May 2019 9:29AM
Out of curiosity, what are the ratings of the generators we use ?
Paul Phare Tue 14 May 2019 11:09AM
I think they are around 30kW and we have two of them. We’ll be well overpowered though
Tom Allen Tue 18 Jun 2019 4:01PM
the sheer weight of batteries to run the event for a week would take more emissions to transport there and back it outweighs the benefit unfortunately... i will be bringing my new solar array though hopefully. can i ask who manages power atm?
Graeme McGregor Tue 9 Apr 2019 10:40AM
That's a super good point. Solar would definitely be the way to go.
Graeme McGregor · Mon 8 Apr 2019 3:59PM
I suspect it will be hard to come up with hard facts and stats about our environmental impact and there will be a tendency to generalise based on anecdotes. Does anyone have any experience doing Environmental Impact Assessments of this sort for events of this kind?
Anecdotally, the things that jump out for me are:
Private transport, including heavy vehicles but particularly flights.
Pre-packaged food
Bottled water
Food waste
Non-eco-friendly glitter
Material waste from camps, including LEDs, plastics etc.
Also, off-site waste disposal, recycling (or lack thereof) etc.