Environmental Sustainability | National Rural Touring Forum

Back in May 2023 we partnered up with Julie’s Bicycle to explore the environmental impacts, practices and carbon footprint of Rural Touring. This lead us to dig deeper into environmental sustainability.

The headline results of that survey were that schemes, artists and venues across Rural Touring are enthusiastic and willing to do more to lessen their environmental impact, however, that we are facing a number of challenges which is making this more difficult and highlighting the need for broader local partnerships and infrastructure.

We also held a What Next? Rural meeting for our members, which focused on three key questions, below you can see the responses we gathered from those who attended.

In 2024, we partnered up with rural touring scheme Take Art, and Julie’s Bicycle, to conduct a case study to further investigate our sectors impact. We also hosted free Environmental Sustainability Training for our members, delivered by Smoking Apples Theatre.

You can find out more about both projects by following the links below.

Power in Numbers

69 % of schemes

are enthusiastic to engage more with artists, venues and audiences on sustainability issues.

81% of artists

reuse and recycle, set, props & costumes after a show run and many source materials sustainably.

74% of venues

try to recycle as much as they can.

The full report by Julie’s Bicycle from 2023 is available to read via a link in the resources section below, however we have created a plain text summary document which is available here.

Julie's Bicycle Report Summary (plain text)