Over the past year, Julie’s Bicycle and Vision for Sustainable Events have worked with ten local authorities, including Bristol, Reading, Liverpool, and Manchester, to trial new environmental standards through the Green Events Code of Practice (GECoP) pilot.
Taking part in the assessment were 60 events, with over 2.3 million visitors, varying from small community events to large festivals like Parklife and Reading.
The project was aimed at exploring how all music, sports, and community events could be encouraged to take immediate environmental action. This comes in the context of Massive Attack’s Act 1.5 gig and the Liverpool Accelerator City, which are representing the ‘gold standard’ for what is possible for sustainable events.
An assessment against GECoP’s minimum baseline of environmental practices, has been proven in this pilot to encourage events of all sizes to take action towards that gold standard:
- 60% of event organisers implemented new environmental measures as a direct result of the pilot;
- 92% expressed a commitment to adopt even more sustainable practices in the coming year;
- 7 out of 10 participating local authorities made changes to policy or procedures for more robust environmental requirements.
These results show the potential positive impact of an assessment against consistent minimum environmental standards. Both participating local authorities and events expressed support for nationally aligned standards, paving the way for future policy.
The participating local authorities were: Bristol City Council, Colchester City Council, Gloucester City Council, Leicester City Council, Liverpool City Council, Maldon District Council, Manchester City Council, Norwich City Council, Reading Borough Council and West Northamptonshire Council.
This report presents the results from the Green Events Code of Practice (GECoP) pilot project, demonstrating significant potential of national minimum standards in unlocking environmental progress across the UK live outdoor events sector