Green Guardians 2023: Big Green Coach, Biopak, ZAP
Welcome to the first part of IQ Magazine’s 2023 Green Guardians – our annual recognition of those eco-warriors and innovators at the forefront of the battle to make the live entertainment industry more sustainable.
The Green Guardians is spearheaded by IQ and an international panel of sustainability experts to highlight and congratulate companies and organisations who are improving the live music business when it comes to being more environmentally friendly.
This year’s list of Green Guardians includes 20 entries across a wide range of event suppliers, campaigners, and solutions providers, all of whom are working tirelessly to reduce the carbon footprint of the live entertainment business.
One of the goals of the Green Guardians initiative is to point decision makers toward suppliers who can help them to improve their environmental credentials. We hope the products, services and initiatives profiled will make a meaningful contribution to cleaner concerts and festivals around the world in the years ahead…
Big Green Coach is the UK’s largest carbon-neutral event travel provider. The company prides itself on doing its part to tackle the environmental impact that travel has on the live events industry, and in 2022 alone, it balanced 824 tonnes of carbon through verified carbon standard ecosystem restoration and protection projects.
With audience travel accounting for almost 80% of carbon emissions for live events, it’s never been more important to think about travel choices. Coach travel is already the greenest option for eventgoers, taking cars off the road and using less land for parking.
Going further in their green efforts, Big Green Coach’s work with Cool Earth means they have now sponsored close to 2m sq.ft. of Amazon rainforest for ten years.
In 2022, all of their coach services were carbon neutral. Emissions for every return trip were worked out and then offset by investing in sustainability projects with Ecolibrium.
BioPak creates sustainable packaging that puts the planet first. They champion the transition to a circular economy with industry-leading products made from plants. BioPak’s product range is predominantly made from renewable materials and is certified compostable. Switching to BioPak packaging, in conjunction with a waste-collection service solution, enables businesses to divert their food and packaging waste from landfill and convert it into nutrient-rich compost. BioPak is dedicated to reducing consumption of fossil fuel-based plastic so future generations can grow and thrive in a better world.
BioPak is currently working on plans to provide a number of high-profile music festivals with plastic-free packaging and com- postable packaging solutions. As experts in food & drink packaging, BioPak is working with festivals’ sustainability teams to provide them with on-site composters, to help them dispose of packaging in the most environmentally friendly way. With the help of BioPak’s packaging impact calculations, they can then quantify the positive impact that these changes have made, identifying how much plastic has been avoided, and how much compost has been created in its place.
Green Producers Club provides a research-based climate tool, Green Producers Tool, tailored to multiple industries within the creative and culture sectors, that both measures emissions and facilitates reduction.
Since the launch last September, Green Producers Club now counts more than 130 organisations using the tool to ensure reductions in their events, festivals, and productions. Members are spread across Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. The Green Producers Club has offices in Oslo and Copenhagen and is planning to expand with offices in Stockholm, Helsinki and Reykjavik by the end of 2024.
The Club facilitates local support and hosts club meetings for members to ensure sharing of knowledge. These meetings are widely popular and are always packed with people and organisations eager to learn and exchange experiences.
The emission factors in the tool, now counting more than 1,500, are calculated by the acclaimed Cicero – Center for International Climate Research. Green Producers Club will continuously develop the tool according to member feedback, new technology and research, and aims to be the most cutting-edge, user-friendly tool in the market.
Greener Power Solutions has already powered multiple events across the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, and Switzerland, and is expanding further. It can provide battery power to practically any location, from a single cabin up to the main stage of a music festival.
Greener’s batteries reduce an event’s carbon footprint, prevent local air pollution, eliminate noise, and save money compared to diesel generators – providing clean energy for all events, anywhere.
In April this year, the Dutch company expanded its operations into the United Kingdom with a new office in Bristol, where it is collaborating with rental partners to replace their diesel generators with batteries.
“No other supplier in the United Kingdom has a rental fleet of batteries with a power of more than 100 kVA”
“No other supplier in the United Kingdom has a rental fleet of batteries with a power of more than 100 kVA,” explains Greener CEO Dieter Castelein. “Greener will be the first to offer these services on a large scale. In the market, the demand for smaller hybrid units has already been proven, and it seems the time has come to work with larger battery systems.”
To achieve its ambitious growth targets and scale up from a capacity of 20MWh in 2023 to 60MWh by the end of 2025, Greener is focusing on emerging markets such as the EV charging market and the energy grid.
By replacing polluting diesel generators with its batteries, Greener has saved nearly 4m litres of diesel and 12m kg of CO2 emissions since its inception.
ZAP Concepts offers consultancy in energy and sustainability; specialising in energy assessment, measurement and logging, together with the design of optimal power supplies for live events through the use of its unique and internationally awarded Smart Power Plan.
As well as working for many internationally renowned festivals and events like Glastonbury, King Charles III Coronation Concert, Ultra Miami, The Ocean Race, Mysteryland, etc, the ZAP Concepts team also works for Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres Tour.
Having assessed the energy consumption of the show, together with Hope Solutions, Coldplay’s creatives and production, ZAP Concepts developed, together with Konik (UK) and Beck (DE), a unique mobile touring battery system.
With the important ongoing support of Coldplay’s touring production management, a ZAP team operates the mobile touring battery system on many of the European shows, contributing to a 47% reduction in direct CO2e emissions compared to Coldplay’s previous world tour.
- IQ will publish entries across all categories over the coming weeks. The full Green Guardians 2023 list appears in issue 122 of IQ Magazine.
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