Sustainable Events: A Fast Guide for Music, Media and Entertainment

There is no shortage of content about sustainable events. There are checklists, toolkits, pledges, frameworks, and award programmes. There are case studies about festivals that switched to reusable cups, and conference venues that installed solar panels on the roof.

Most of it is true. Some of it is even useful (especially on our website!).

But for music, media and entertainment professionals who are trying to figure out where to actually begin, the volume of information can be its own obstacle. You end up knowing sustainability matters without knowing what to do about it on Monday morning.

This article is not a comprehensive guide. It is a signpost. It points to the areas that tend to have the most structural impact for events in this sector, and gives you enough context to know whether you are looking at a real lever or a decorative one.

Start with your emissions, not your actions

The most common mistake organisations make when approaching sustainable events is beginning with actions rather than data. They switch to LED lighting, source local catering, or introduce a sustainability rider before they have any picture of what their actual emissions look like.

Actions feel productive. Measurement feels administrative. But without a baseline, you cannot prioritise effectively, you cannot demonstrate progress, and you cannot defend your claims if anyone asks.

The GHG Protocol, which is the global standard for emissions accounting, divides emissions into three scopes. Scope 1 covers what you directly burn. Scope 2 covers the electricity you buy. Scope 3 covers everything else in your value chain, including travel, supply chain, waste, and the activities of your attendees and contractors.

For most events in music, media and entertainment, Scope 3 is where the bulk of emissions sit. That means audience travel, artist travel, freight, accommodation, and the embedded carbon in your production infrastructure. Understanding this picture does not require a full lifecycle assessment before you can do anything. But it does require you to stop treating energy-efficient lighting as the headline act.

A carbon footprint exercise, even a relatively light one, gives you the information you need to make defensible decisions about where to focus. It is the foundation everything else sits on.

Energy: generation and procurement, not just consumption

Energy is a natural starting point for most event sustainability work, and it is a meaningful one. For outdoor and touring events in particular, temporary power is one of the most significant and controllable emissions sources.

The direction of travel here is clear. Diesel generators are increasingly hard to justify in any context. The market for cleaner temporary power has developed significantly, with HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) fuel, battery storage systems, and hybrid generator solutions now available at scale. Grid connection, where feasible, remains the most straightforward option.

For film and TV productions, stage power and location power both merit scrutiny. Industry toolkits such as albert's production carbon calculator (for UK broadcasters and producers) exist specifically to help production companies understand and reduce their energy footprint.

For conferences and media events held in fixed venues, the key question is whether the venue can demonstrate what its electricity supply actually is. A venue claiming 100% renewable energy should be able to point to a Power Purchase Agreement or REGO certificates. "Green tariff" alone is not a verifiable claim.

Energy procurement, in short, is not just about how much power you use. It is about where that power comes from and whether that claim holds up.

Travel and transport: the category you cannot ignore

Audience and artist travel is typically the largest single emissions category for live events. For major festivals, it routinely accounts for more than 50% of total event emissions. For international conferences, the proportion can be even higher.

This does not mean you can solve it entirely. But it does mean you cannot treat it as someone else's problem.

The practical interventions here fall into a few categories. First, travel information and incentives: making low-carbon travel options visible, easy, and ideally rewarded. Shuttle services from rail stations, clear public transport information, and on-site car sharing arrangements are operational choices that do shift behaviour in aggregate.

Second, site selection: for touring productions, conference series, and broadcast events that move across multiple locations, where you go matters. Routing decisions that reduce long-haul flights, or hub strategies that cluster activity in transport-accessible cities, are genuine emissions decisions dressed as logistics decisions.

Third, artist and crew travel: for live music specifically, the carbon embedded in tour routing and travel modes is significant. Ground transport for shorter legs, consolidated freight movements, and advance planning that reduces last-minute air freight are all within scope for a production team that is paying attention.

The point is not to eliminate travel. Events exist because people gather. The point is to treat travel as a variable you actively manage rather than a given you account for after the fact.

Waste: the area where small changes are visible, but systemic thinking is rarer

Waste is where most event sustainability programmes start, partly because it is tangible and partly because it is visible to audiences. Reusable cup schemes, on-site recycling stations, compostable catering ware: these are familiar territory for many festival and event producers.

They are worth doing. But they are not the whole picture, and they are often not the biggest opportunity.

The more structural question is about procurement. What you bring onto a site determines what problem you have to manage when people leave. Catering contracts that specify packaging requirements, production suppliers whose material choices are part of the tender criteria, and set and stage builds designed for reuse or return rather than single-event disposal: these decisions happen weeks or months before load-in, and they determine the ceiling of what is achievable on the day.

Food waste also warrants specific attention. Surplus food redistribution partnerships, better forecasting for catering volumes, and coordination with hospitality suppliers are all areas where the environmental and financial case tends to align.

One practical note: waste audits, where you actually sort and weigh what leaves the site, are one of the most useful tools available to event organisers. They routinely surface surprises about where waste is actually coming from, and they give you the data to negotiate better terms with suppliers and set realistic targets for future events.

Supply chain: the conversation the sector is still learning to have

Sustainable events do not exist in isolation. They depend on production suppliers, equipment hire companies, fabrication specialists, caterers, logistics providers, and a long list of contractors whose own practices are largely invisible by default.

Scope 3 reporting, as required by an increasing number of corporate climate frameworks, obliges organisations to account for those upstream and downstream emissions. That regulatory direction is moving in one way only.

The practical starting point for most event businesses is not a full supply chain audit. It is beginning to ask the right questions in procurement conversations. Do your key suppliers measure their emissions? Do they have a stated reduction target? Can they provide data that would allow you to include their activities in your own reporting?

These questions accomplish two things. They signal to suppliers that sustainability performance is a factor in your contracting decisions, which changes market incentives over time. And they give you the information you need to build a more complete picture of your own footprint.

For large-scale productions and touring operations with significant freight and logistics spend, transport emissions from the supply chain can be substantial. Understanding the embedded carbon in equipment hire, set construction, and specialist production services is increasingly part of responsible event management.

Frameworks and reporting: what you might be asked to demonstrate

The regulatory and commercial environment around sustainability reporting is changing. Depending on the size of your organisation and who your clients, funders, or partners are, you may already be encountering requests for emissions data, sustainability commitments, or evidence of progress against stated targets.

In the UK and European context, several frameworks are relevant to music, media and entertainment businesses. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) provides the most credible pathway for corporate emissions reduction commitments. CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) is increasingly used as a disclosure mechanism by organisations in entertainment supply chains. CSRD (the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) has extended mandatory sustainability reporting requirements to a significantly larger group of companies.

For event-specific contexts, voluntary frameworks such as the ISO 20121 standard for sustainable event management provide a process-based approach. Some broadcasters and major venues are beginning to make sustainability criteria a formal part of their supplier requirements.

You do not need to be across all of these immediately. But knowing which frameworks are relevant to your context, and whether your current data infrastructure could support the reporting they require, is a useful thing to understand before you are asked.

Where to go from here

This guide has touched on five areas: emissions measurement, energy, travel, waste, and supply chain. Each of them is a meaningful direction of travel. None of them is a complete answer on its own.

The organisations that make real progress on event sustainability tend to share a few characteristics. They start with measurement. They treat sustainability as an operational and procurement question, not just a communications one. They take Scope 3 seriously rather than managing only what is directly visible. And they build internal capability rather than treating it as a one-off compliance exercise.

If you are at the point of wanting to move from general awareness to structured action, Hope Solutions works with businesses across the music, media and entertainment sectors to do exactly that. From baseline carbon assessments to supply chain engagement and science-based target setting, the work is grounded in your sector's specific operational reality, not adapted from a generic corporate playbook.

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