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Arcola Theatre’s Carbon Footprint, April 2011

We are working with Julies Bicycle to monitor our carbon emissions using their Industry Green Tool, which involves entering figures for our consumption of electricity, water, and consumables as well as figures on staff and audience travel in to their website on a monthly basis. April was the first month in out new building on Ashwin Street where we have had enough data to start using their monitoring tool again. Arcola Theatre’s carbon footprint for April 2011 was equal to 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide, that’s 0.38 kg CO2e per seat, per show. The average person in the UK will emit 10 tonnes of CO2e per year, if Arcola Theatre continues with these emissions throughout the year our annual carbon footprint would be 36 tonnes of CO2e.

We don’t think that’s good enough, over the month of May we will be working to reduce our carbon emissions further. We will start by ensuring that we are not heating the building unnecessarily over the warmer weather and ensuring all electrical outlets are switched off when the building is closed. The Industry Green tool assumes an average travel emission for each audience member per show, unless we enter data regarding audience travel. The estimated average travel emissions are the biggest contributor to our carbon footprint at present and we’d like to be able to provide the site with more accurate data on audience travel therefore we are conducting an Audience Travel Survey this month. If you would like to help us with this then please click on the link at the end of this article.

Travel Survey

Go to Arcola Energy

Global warming, resource wars, conflict and survival

Yesterday I was talking to RSA Arts & Ecology Centre contributor/writer Caleb Klaces and we both started raving about Dave Eggers’ book What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. It’s a supreme piece of narrative non-fiction writing in which Eggers tells the extraordinary life of Valentino Achak …
Go to RSA Arts & Ecology