pic

Sustainability

With an eye to the future, The Sidmouth Folk Festival aims to reduce the environmental impact of the festival where ever possible. We have signed up to A Greener Future to support our journey, and help measure our impact.

Re-Usuable Cups We are pleased to continue having reusable souvenir drinks cups at our bars and no single use plastics at our catering stands. Why not bring your own reusable drinks bottle and use our Water Refill Points. These are located at The Ham, the Market Square (on the side of the Market building towards the town), in the ‘arches’ on the seafront (at the western end of the Esplanade), below the Cricket Ground, at the Campsite and at The Bulverton. We strive to reduce our reliance on single use plastics and to make the festival a more environmentally sustainable event.

Our caterers sign up to a policy of no polystyrene, or single use plastics

No pre-bottled water is provided as standard to crew or artists

Recycling – We are are committed to ensuring as much of the waste we generate, by using companies who sorting the waste and getting it to the right recycling facilities in the area – as well as giving us a post event report on the full journey of waste, carbon footprint and the volumes separated for recycling.  We will then be able to measure this to that we can look at how we can improve for future events.

Water and waste – our water supply comes direct from the mains at all of our sites so we don’t need to tanker in water to the festival, and we are lucky that we can use the mains drainage for our toilet waste at both the campsite and at The Ham.  This means that we can keep transport miles down and avoid the use of large tankers to transport waste to local treatment works.

Power – All of our power at the Ham runs from a mains electricity supply directly on site, which means no generator diesel usage and helps to keep our C02 footprint down.  At Blackmore Gardens, our generators are switched off at night, and we use overnight power from the mains supply to ensure our food chillers can stay at temperature.  In the future, we hope to reinstate the mains power at the campsite to further reduce our diesel usage.

We reuse the materials that we buy for the Festival, such as signage, furnishings and décor, as well as other supplies to help us build the events.  We don’t like to throw anything away!  We have a large storage where we keep materials and will always re-purpose where we are able to.

Festival Bus – The Festival bus is a well-used and fantastic way to get from the campsite to the town, plus it means keeping cars off the road and therefore reducing road miles by using one vehicle to transport everyone to where they need to be.

Travel to The Festival We strongly encourage visitors to consider travel plans carefully. Help reduce the carbon footprint of the festival by using public transport, coaches or car share either with friends or perhaps with GoCarShare or Liftshare. These options also reduce pollution, congestion, noise and local impacts.

Calculate and balance carbon emissions from your journey through https://ecolibrium.earth/take-action-tackle-travel-impacts/

Local Suppliers – we are proud to use a large number of local suppliers from Devon and surrounding areas, including some of our wonderful food stalls who source their delicious food locally, which means we can keep transport miles down and in turn this helps to reduce our carbon footprint.

We encourage using vendors local to the festival and ensure several dedicated vegetarian and vegan options are available to festivalgoers.

We welcome your feedback and support in making The Sidmouth Folk Festival a more sustainable event for generations to come.