BBC News Report on Eco Action's work at the 2010 Isle of Wight Festival
Last year our combined efforts saw The Isle of Wight Festival win A Greener Festival Award with 'outstanding’ status, an achievement only matched by 11 other festivals worldwide. This year with your continued support we hope to go even further on our journey to make the festival a leading sustainable event.
New for this year is a unique collaboration with The British Council who have come on board as official supporters of our eco actions and have supplied renewable energy to The Hive, which will be exclusively powered by solar energy and locally sourced bio-diesel. They have also leant their support to our environmental charity work that over the last year has seen the festival reintroduce indigenous black poplar trees to the island as well as carry out a nationally significant bee survey which formed part of the Give Bees a Chance Campaign. This year our environmental work will continue headlined by our bee campaign, which from this year will be known as Let it Bee, focusing on protecting and monitoring a local island bee habitat called The Field of Hope.
SHARE IT AND GET PRIORITY PARKING ON SITE
From the carbon audit carried out last year travel, not surprisingly, was the biggest environmental impact of the festival so we really need your help in reducing the amount of vehicles travelling to the site. This year thanks to our lift-share partners FestivalBudi, it is easy to fill up your car or find a lift and as an extra incentive you will get priority parking enabling you to get in and start enjoying the weekend’s entertainment even earlier.
Why use FestivalBudi?
- Free to use you simply share the travel costs
- Links drivers and passengers together online
- Part of the largest car sharing scheme in the UK
- Reduces the pollution and congestion on our roads
- Priority Car Parking Permit
Here are 4 easy steps to register and qualify for a priorty parking permit:
- Register your journey and activate your account
- Search for matches and contact those you wish to share with
- Once you have received a reply from your matches and agreed to share, go to 'my contacts' and click YES to confirm you are sharing!
- Click back to your FestivalBudi home page to view and print your parking permit.
BIKE IT
An even greener way to get to the Festival is by bike and with safe and secure bike racks available there is no excuse not to get on two wheels. Haven’t got your own bike? Well we’ve thought of that too and are again offering a bike hire scheme on site thanks to our partners London Bicycle Tour Company. You can hire a bike by the hour or for the whole weekend making it easy to pop out and replenish supplies when it suits you.
THE BIG FESTIVAL BIKE RIDE, was a great success last year so again we will be setting off at 10am on both Saturday and Sunday mornings to guide you to some interesting places away from the festival site as well as giving you some local insights along the way. It will take about an hour and a half and will be a great way to see bit more of the island before you go home again. The meeting point for this will be the London Bicycle Touring Company hire point near the Police Station and it only costs £10. If you bring your own bike you are welcome to join in too.
CHARGE IT
Eco-Charge are giving you the chance to charge your mobile phone, laptop, ipod or camera for FREE by pedalling an exercise bike for twenty to thirty minutes, or you can pay £2 for the same full charge minus the exercise. Completely solar powered, Eco-Charge are giving half of all their profits made to our "Let it Bee" fund.
GIFT TO NATURE
Gift to Nature has been our charity partner on the island for the last two years and thanks to them we have achieved a great deal in leaving a positive environmental impact for islanders and visitors to enjoy all year around. This includes not only the work we have done with the bees but also this year we introduced some black poplar trees to the island by planting the first three saplings on the festival site. Prior to this, this indigenous species had all but died out on the island. The charity has also written a detailed management plan for the whole of the festival site and manages enhancement work on an ongoing basis which includes the creating of a path through the millennium wood, the planting of the black poplar trees and also the planting of a wildflower meadow in the arboretum, as well as a survey of a pond on site.
GIVE BEES A CHANCE TURNS INTO LET IT BEE
So much progress has been made on our headline campaign Give Bees a Chance, which has run for the last two years that we have decided to reflect that by changing the name for 2010 to Let it Bee, a fitting name change with Macca headlining this year’s festival. Give Bees a Chance was started by the festival in 2008 to build awareness around the plight of the dwindling bee populations in the UK and all over the world because of loss of habitat and unexplained phenomena such as Colony Collapse Disorder. The campaign was a great success with the highlight last year being a significant piece of research initiated by the festival and Gift to Nature, which was funded in part by the money raised from selling the fluffy bees. It looked at habitat benefits for the solitary mining bee in the south of the Isle of Wight. When the results of this piece of research are unveiled later this year they will have national as well as global significance.
This year the awareness campaign for the bees moves on under the new banner of Let it Bee and this time we will be selling exclusive T Shirts to raise funds for a local bee habitat located in the middle of the island called the Field of Hope where some rare types of bees and wasps have been found. We want to raise money to create a management plan for the field in order to protect and monitor it long term. We will be doing some work-days there before the festival just as an initial tidy up with our partners, Medina High School.
The bee campaign also sponsors local honeybee hives at Limerstone Farm.
THE HIVE IN THE ARBORETUM
This year we have taken over The Arboretum, renamed it The Hive and created what we hope is an area of calm where you can have a quiet picnic; a frolic in our newly created wildflower meadow; a listen to some acoustic sounds from the British Council solar-powered stage; as well as find out about the work the festival is helping to fund on the island with their charity partners Gift to Nature. Come and see us and let us know your thoughts on how together we can make a difference.
WHERE DO WE GET OUR ENERGY FROM?
Again where possible the festival will be using renewable energy in the form of solar and responsibly sourced bio-diesel. The Arboretum will exclusively be run on renewables including a new solar powered stage sponsored by The British Council.
ECO CREDENTIALS
This year our efforts are not just being monitored by us in our annual carbon audit (for last year’s results click here) but also by music industry climate change experts, Julie’s Bicycle, who are awarding Industry Green status to deserving festivals. The Isle of Wight Festival 2010 is also being managed in compliance to BS8901 using Eventberry - The new benchmark for sustainable best practice at outdoor events and festivals. As if that wasn’t enough we have become a 10:10 festival so we will have to prove a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions year on year.
DID YOU FORGET SOMETHING? PLEASE REMEMBER TO TAKE EVERYTHING HOME WITH YOU!
For the first time last year we ran a waste campaign to try to persuade you that your belongings had more value to you than us and thank-you to all of you who made an extra special effort when you left to take all of your stuff with you, it really made a difference to our clean up operation. Contrary to popular belief charity organisations won’t take tents and camping equipment to overseas trouble spots and so we are left with hundreds of tents, which we have no option to send to landfill. Please this year can you help us be one of the first festivals to achieve real progress in waste left behind at the end of the event.
Looking forward to seeing you all in June.Mark, Rick and Juliet.
Eco Action Partnership Ltd.
Contact us
Tel : 0208 241 4411
mark.ward@ecoactionpartnership.com
juliet.ross-kelly@ecoactionpartnership.com
richard.storey@ecoactionpartnership.com
www.ecoactionpartnership.com
With special thanks to
Jim Fawcett (Isle of Wight Council), Sue Cracknell(Isle of Wight Council), Ian Boyd (Island 2000), Sam and Martin (Gift to Nature), Finian Day-Lewis (Photographer), Kevin Hunt (Dept of Energy and Climate Change), David Viner (The British Council), Firefly Solar, Alison Tickell and Catherine Langabeer (Julie's Bicycle), Andrew Williams (Eventberry) and all at 10:10.