Sustainable making – from personal to organisational

As part of Arts on Tour’s Green Touring Online series I co-presented a session on sustainable making practices. Here’s the gist.

I’ve been developing techniques for working with salvaged and low-impact materials for the last 27 years, and my work for performance has toured nationally and internationally to theatres, schools, festivals, galleries and museums.

There are different approaches to sustainable making. Some work with what I’d call ‘pure’ materials – biodegradable unbleached fabrics, vegetable dyes, clays that return to the earth. Others practice a lightness of touch: temporarily animating objects, for example, and then putting them back so that no trace remains.

My practice could be defined as ‘frugality’: thinking about the provenance, impact and end of life of materials you use and the objects you create. For me this means working with salvaged materials, which are often plastics and metals or compounds. To my thinking these are still of the earth: it’s our attitudes toward them as disposable that make them valueless, but actually they’re the sum of a remarkable amount of invested energy and knowledge, and carry vast potential in their engineering properties.

This practice involves identifying waste streams that are available reliably and in volume; sourcing secondhand; using offcuts, remnants and seconds wherever possible; reusing and repurposing from existing repertoire; developing techniques for working with what you source; letting the materials and the techniques you’ve developed inform the design process; mapping your local area to identify sources and willing contributors; and strategic and well-organised hoarding of useful materials.

In the workshop, that has played out in many ways including replacing structural aluminium with home grown bamboo and eliminating solvents. The most important factor, though, has been honing material empathy – the ability to sense the strengths and limitations of a material and trust your own judgement, even when there are no industry standards for its use.

It’s been 27 years of tinkering, but when I became Lead Maker and Head of Workshop at Terrapin Puppet Theatre in Hobart, I faced the challenge of translating this personal body of knowledge into an organisational practice.

While it’s hopefully changing now, it’s been a common experience for people introducing sustainability into a workplace to encounter difficulties so I’d like to acknowledge those briefly….

You might come in with a body of knowledge that others don’t share, and your passion might not be met: different people will have different priorities. If you’re working in a lean organisation it can be hard to justify the time and energy required to transform operations, especially since it doesn’t generate an income (at least at first). There are many misconceptions: for example, in construction there’s a myth that work made from salvaged material will look bad, fall apart or take ages to source and build. While there’s a lot of sustainability information out there most of it comes from other industries or experiences and there’s no clear path for your specific situation: you have to map it yourself. And, if you’re the first sustainability champion in the room, you can feel lonely and resented for banging on about it when people have enough on their plates.

Here are some strategies I’ve found useful.

  • Find your champions in different departments and encourage them
  • Make it cultural: invite everyone on the ride, show them that it’s a riddle and an exciting challenge
  • Make it clear that this is iterative, we’re all learning and trying together and the landscape of it is constantly changing. Don’t be a gatekeeper of the moral high ground, encourage effort at every level.
  • In traditional theatre, there’s a linear process of creation from writer, through director, designer, construction team, and out to the performers and technicians. To do this work we need to break up that heirarchy so that the workshop can inform designers, performers can offer insight to directors, the conversations are transparent and inclusive.
  • Be explicit about the values you share as an organisation. When is it worth it? What do we consider important? Where do we draw the line? Then you can trust each other to work in different areas knowing that you’re all pulling in the same direction.
  • Push the transformation upstream to where the decisions are made. In theatre this means materials informing design, and questioning whether a story needs to be told or whether the design is the simplest possible solution. If we kept pushing upstream, we’d start asking of the culture: how do we signal status and success? What do we consider beautiful or impressive? How do we recognise masterly work, and why are these things so often associated with expense and environmental harm?

Here’s one of my attempts to communicate the many considerations when choosing materials in the workshop. A stoplight system highlights where the trouble areas are, triggering discussions about alternatives. The whole team signs off when they’re satisfied they’ve done all they can. It’s a work in progress!

We’ve also developed Terrapin’s first sustainablity policy and have recently been certified carbon neutral through Climate Active, with a 43% reduction in emissions in the second year of auditing due almost entirely to reduced international flights and freight, and in spite of company growth. Unfortunately carbon certification in this country relies on offsets, which are proving to be not just flawed but in many cases obviating the need to change behaviour, and at worst actively increasing emissions. So my last provocation for you:

It’s an open question what system can replace offsets to trigger actual emissions reduction and rapid transitioning. But let’s figure it out, fast.