Hay Festival Green Toolkit
A greenprint for the creation of a sustainable Hay Festival.
Hay Festival has been improving its overall sustainability for many years: Hay Festival Green is our programme for managing and mitigating our environmental impact. We have focused on three key areas: our own direct impacts, the impacts of our audience, and the programming of events, workshops and outreach work that stimulate debate and discussion about key issues.
A guide to sustainability
The Hay Festival Green Toolkit is in essence a guide to all of the changes we have been undertaking to make Hay Festival more sustainable; however, as part of this process we wanted to be able to share with other Festival organisers all the things we have tried and tested. All festivals have common elements so while not all the suggestions may be individually appropriate, there will hopefully be useful information for all.
The Toolkit is not designed to be a static document – as we discover new ideas and solutions, we will post and highlight these. Similarly, this is not designed to be just Hay Festival’s experience – if your festival has tried and tested ways of improving sustainability, please let us know and we’ll add them in.
Digital Footprinting
The 2020 Pandemic has had a major impact on work and leisure and Hay Festival is no exception. Our move to being solely digital for 2020 and 2021 was not easy but it has had some significant environmental benefits in terms of lowering our CO2 emissions particularly from transport and infrastructure. However there are still impacts from our digital Festival and we have been measuring the impact of our Festival Digital Footprint and will share the results as soon as they are available. We have also been looking at ways of reducing our digital impacts and have created the attached fact sheet to outline what makes up a digital footprint and how it can be reduced.