On Tour

By the time you hit the road, much of your impact is already baked in – your transport is set, your accommodation is booked, your show designed and built. Still, there’s important green action you can be taking day-to-day. This is when waste minimisation takes place, and you can reduce your tour’s emissions with choices you make about what and where you eat, and how you get about. 

The work you do on tour is also important because it’s public facing. This is where you have an impact through your sphere of influence – walking the walk, and showing venues, audiences, and other touring companies what green kaupapa looks like in action.

Early on, you should have held a sustainability meeting with your wider production team, but before you head off it’s important to brief the actual team hitting the road – your performers, stage manager, op and the like.

A pre-tour briefing is where you make sure everyone’s across the logistics, but also where you set up the culture and values of the group. This might include things like hauora/well-being, how you’ll settle spending (the Splitwise app is great), and what people need in terms of space and support. 

Include a section on green touring, led by your sustainability officer, to discuss your environmental goals, answer questions, offer tips and brainstorm ways the team can take part.

Pre tour briefing

  • Approaches and things to include

    • Best general practice when working in theatre = don’t be a dick. Just as with your approach to presenters, your green briefing should be a conversation, not a lecture or list of demands. People are more likely to get on board if they know what you’re shooting for and why, and are part of devising the action to get there. Your team will have strategies you haven’t thought of. 

    • Whilst the focus of this briefing should be on the people going on tour, it’s important to make clear that they’re part of a broader effort, and that any actions they take are appreciated and supported. 

      • If you’ve got a management team, have them attend to discuss the company’s wider green goals. 

      • Let your touring party know how presenters are supporting your green goals.

    • Share the environmental strategies you’ve made in the pre-planning stage and the impact these will have, especially if you’ve made choices that will mean things like shared accommodation or longer travel (people will want to know why they’re spending two days on the road rather than a flight). 

    • Ask the team to track any side trips (for meals, etc) so this transport can be included in your tour emission calculations – explain how this data is best gathered and recorded. 

    • Talk through any practices you’ll follow as a company (how you might minimise waste, where you’ll keep recycling bins), and brainstorm action they can take as individuals: packing and using reusable coffee cups, limiting meat consumption, etc (more on this below). 

    • Try to embed some of these practices before they hit the road – e.g. provide a compost bin, recycling station and water station in the rehearsal room.

  • If you’re providing your team with a tourbook, include information to help them reduce their footprint on the road.

    Things to include

    • Cafes and restaurants that are vegetarian and vegan, or that give discounts for BYO containers/cups.

    • Farmers markets and sellers of local produce.

    • Composting facilities (e.g. community gardens).

    • Recycling facilities, including locations for soft plastics recycling (e.g. the Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme at various supermarkets in NZ).

    • Sustainable businesses and cultural activities that support the local community. Don't spend your money at a big chain supermarket if there’s a local greengrocer. (You can’t have climate justice without social justice.)

    • Environmental volunteer activities (such as tree planting, beach clean-ups, etc.)that coincide with tour locations, and if the schedule allows, can be offered as a touring company activity (not on a day off!). Check out the database here.

Tips for individuals

Whilst the impact of a theatre tour is largely set by the organisation, individuals can make a difference. Here are some hacks to adopt or pass on to your team:

  • BYO reusable coffee cup, drink bottle, cutlery set, and take them everywhere.
    Use them on the road. Use them on the plane. Hand disposable cutlery back to flight attendants when they bring out meals rather than when they collect up the rubbish – it’ll mean they’re more likely to be reused rather than go in the bin.

  • Download the airline phone app.
    Use digital boarding passes rather than the ones they print on non-recyclable paper.

  • Compost!
    Organic waste going to landfill is dumb. Separate food scraps from general waste so these can be composted. If you’re staying in a hotel, store your used tea bags and scraps in a reusable container so you can combine forces with the rest of your tour party at the end of each stay. 

  • BYO container for takeaways.
    They’re also good for leftovers from meals out, for packing toiletries so they don’t spill in your bag, or for storing food scraps to compost later (probably don’t combine all three).

  • BYO body wash / shampoo / conditioner.
    All those tiny single-use bottles at hotels will go straight to the tip.

  • Buy a box of tea bags / bag of coffee for the tour.
    Use them instead of all those single-serve plastic-lined sachets you get at hotels. Nespresso might say they recycle their pods – your hotel probably won’t. Get yourself an AeroPress so you can use your own coffee (and save money on takeaways). 

  • Don’t use plastic bottles provided backstage if there’s drinkable tap water.

  • Avoid packaging when shopping.

  • Consolidate your bins.
    Reduce/recycle whatever you can, but where you can’t, at the very least use a single bin rather than several around your hotel room/apartment – this way they needn’t replace all of the bin bags when you leave.

  • Wash your clothes in cold water and dry them on hangers from the wardrobe to save using the dryer.

  • Turn off the lights, turn off the lights.

  • And don’t get new towels every day.

Tips for stage managers / sustainability officers

Some actions are better coordinated across the whole group.

Make the most of your food

  • Share food and shop together to minimise packaging and waste.

  • Make a tour ‘pantry’ box for sauces, oils and spices that are not regularly used and are tricky to transport. This will save individuals buying and disposing each time they are needed. 

  • Have a company leftovers dinner on the last night in a town to combine and use up foodstuffs before travel days. 

  • Shop at bulk-buy stores for smaller amounts of items like flour, cereals, pastas and nuts, which make them easier to use up before you travel. 

  • Plan ahead and offer items that you won’t use / can’t transport to venue staff rather than leaving them behind at accommodation. Hotels will more than likely have a policy to dispose of leftover foodstuffs.

  • Have a small chilly bin with an ice brick for transporting cold items on driving legs. 

Reduce your waste 

  • Share the location of recycling bins at accommodation in the touring party group chat, so people know where to find them. Asking about the recycling bins at hotel check in / venue induction is also a good way to drive demand. If they don’t provide them, bring your own (this could be a collapsible camping bin, or just a cardboard box) and drop the contents off to a recycling bin when you find one.

  • Make a soft plastics recycling bag (that can be squished into the top of a road case) available backstage / in the van / at the accommodation. Drop it off to a Soft Plastics Recycling bin at a supermarket when full. 

  • Make time in the travel schedule to eat in at restaurants/cafes, including coffee stops, to save takeaway packaging.

  • Return lanyards to the presenter at the end of your season (and gently suggest they reuse them in future).

Coordinate company compost. Kerbside collection is on its way here, and commonplace overseas, otherwise look for a compost bin on the ShareWaste app, at a local cafe or in a community garden – you’ll find some hidden gems that you might otherwise have missed! It’s worth investing in a folding silicone bucket with a lid and handle – that way you can empty it, fold it up and pop it in your tote bag, rather than lugging a bulky container around for the rest of your day.

Individual and collective Action

Given the magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis, you’ll hear people question the effectiveness of individual action versus collective action. Fair question (though often voiced by folks who aren’t intending to do either…). Does one person recycling make any difference? Are they better off pushing for changes en masse through voting and protesting? Is there any point to any of this?

Polluting industries are keen to place responsibility for climate action onto the individual – it absolves them of the need to change the way they do their business. The same motivates those who say Aotearoa / the theatre sector is too small to make any difference. 

But this doesn’t mean that there’s no point to individual action. We need to do both. One thing leads to the other. We can walk and chew gum. No shit, big business and governments need to do more, and we need to push them to do it, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. Besides, individual action is rewarding and motivating – it brings change you can see, it can influence others and it can inspire you to collective action.

Photo Credit: Fié Neo

The search for a compost drop-off spot in Prague led us to this charming urban farm. Photo: Ralph McCubbin Howell

Minimise waste and energy use at your hotel 

  • Hang costumes to dry overnight, rather than using the dryer. The costumes can be refreshed (if needed) in the dryer on a shorter/cooler cycle, saving both emissions and wear on the fabric, and giving garments a longer life. 

  • Remind company members to turn off lights and air conditioning when leaving dressing rooms. 

  • Provide face cloths and towels for make-up removal, and/or facilitate the washing of reusable make-up pads in wash bags with costume washing to avoid using disposable wipes. 

  • Check with venues if they have battery and light bulb recycling. Hold on to these until you find a venue that does have proper disposal options.

Company kai with The Griegol team touring the USA in 2023. Photo: Ralph McCubbin Howell

Tips for Touring Technicians

  • Turn things off when they’re not in active use (e.g. meal breaks or pre-show). Incandescent lights only draw power when they’re up, but LEDS, movers, dimmer racks, sound desks and speakers often have some constant power draw (even when “off”). Design your rig so that switches for accessories are within reach. (Make sure you allow time to check that all your instruments are talking to each other when you do power them up).

  • When you’re plotting, start your lights lower (e.g. 50%), then bring them up as needed. If you snap them up to full, it puts more stress on the filament, which makes them more likely to blow, and your eyes will adjust so that you might end up recording a higher intensity than you need to.

  • Reign in the lights for your curtain calls (they’re often the brightest cues for a show). 

  • Use rechargeable batteries, especially for mic packs, and make sure you’ve passed this onto venue techs. Lithium-ion batteries generally hold their charge for longer and can be recharged more often than other types.

Te Wao Nui a Tāne

Mai i te purapura iti rawa
Ka tupu ko te tino rākau
From the smallest seeds
Grow the mightiest trees

Photo Credit: Fié Neo

Merch

Photo Credit: Trick of the Light Theatre

If you’re doing show merch, factor in environmental considerations from the outset. 

  • Choose suppliers with ethical and environmental credentials.

  • As with printed marketing materials, use a carbon neutral printer or one that uses eco-friendly processes (e.g. 100% post-consumer recycled paper, vegetable-based inks and alcohol-free printing processes). 

  • As with costumes, use clothing from ethical suppliers and made from sustainable materials (organic cotton, bamboo, etc). Check out Common Objective’s Organisation Database.

  • Selling t-shirts or similar means transporting a whole range of sizes. Decent tote bags or tea towels are a one-size alternative and mean transporting less. (Nadia Reid’s got game when it comes to sock merch.)

  • Think outside the square. Your biggest sellers are likely to be things that are unique to your show rather than slapping a logo on something generic.

Eating on tour

Adam Ogle, Photo Courtesy of Indian Ink Theatre Company

Choices around food are highly personal, and are influenced by a number of factors – taste, culture, health, budget. They can also make a huge difference to your environmental impact. A vegetarian diet will lower your footprint considerably, a vegan diet will lower it more. Choosing seasonal and locally sourced produce, and minimising/composting food waste will make a difference no matter what you’re eating.

Things aren’t always clear-cut – despite the greenwash, the claim that our meat and dairy industry as a whole is sustainable is highly dubious. At the same time, highly processed/packaged vegan products will likely have a bigger emissions footprint than locally sourced kai moana.

See the graph below for a comparison of food choices.

Beef is by far the heaviest hitter, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing – just reducing the amount of red meat you eat will make a massive difference. Swapping out beef for chicken will reduce an individual's emissions by 42 per cent.

It’s not for you to dictate how others eat or spend their per diems, but you can put the information out there. You could suggest collective action as part of your tour kaupapa (such as once-a-week red meat), and you can choose what you’ll pay for as a company. For example, you could have a policy to only buy vegetarian food or coffee in reusable cups when it’s on the company dime.

Waste: Reduce, reuse, recycle

The average New Zealander produces 700kg of landfill waste each year, which adds up to 4.2% of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. Much of this waste has a lifespan of hundreds or thousands of years. Globally, food waste accounts for 6% of the world’s emissions budget, and inorganic waste 3.2%.

In Aotearoa, the average bin is 30–50% food waste. When organic waste goes to landfill, it doesn’t have access to optimal microbial ecosystems and oxygen to break it down, which causes decomposition to occur anaerobically (without oxygen) and incredibly slowly (sometimes over decades), and greenhouse gases to be produced.

In terms of inorganic waste, up to 80% of the plastic that ends up in our ocean comes from landfills. It breaks down into microplastics and washes through waterways and storm water into our rivers, which feed our oceans. Microplastics have now been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica. On our current trajectory, by 2050 there will be more plastic by volume in the ocean than fish.

While 4.2% of our overall emissions may seem small, this equates to 3 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. But we can drastically reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill with changes in behaviour.

The Waste Hierarchy / Behavioural change

Everyone’s heard of the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. The key is to remember that they’re not equal options – they go in that specific order. Recycling is a last resort before sending things to the landfill – it’s even better to reduce waste in the first place.

The Rubbish Trip is a project of Hannah Blumhardt and Liam Prince who run workshops and advocacy on living Zero Waste in Aotearoa (their regional shopping guide is a goldmine). They suggest applying a full six Rs to every purchasing decision:

“The number one thing we do before anything else is we refuse what we do not need. Then we seek to replace things we do need that are wasteful with a non-wasteful alternative. Whatever we cannot refuse or replace, we reduce our consumption of. We reuse whatever we possibly can. Only then do we start to think about recycling, and what we are left with we should be able to rot in a home compost.” (The Rubbish Trip – a short documentary available at Happen Films)

Once you’re on tour, you’re likely beyond these first few steps, so the work is to encourage recycling and composting. People are creatures of habit, packing in and out shows can be hectic, and traditionally much has gone straight to the skip, so this requires a behavioural change. Behavioural psychologists suggest the following strategies to help shift habits:

  1. Remove context cues that trigger bad habits.
    e.g. Run through your bin set up when everyone’s present at venue induction and again before pack-out begins.

  2. Alter the environment to make it difficult to continue with bad habits.
    e.g. Make chucking stuff harder; make recycling and composting easier. 

    Have recycling bins onstage during pack-in and pack-out. 

    Have compost bins on the bench in the green room.

    Place rubbish bins further away.

  3. Monitor behaviour, so you can provide timely feedback to halt bad habits.

    e.g. Put clear signs on recycling bins to remind people what goes where. Have your sustainability officer keep an eye on them to gently redirect if any things go astray.

Secrets in Your Streets by Java Dance at Dunedin Arts Festival 2021. Photo Credit: Sacha Copeland

Waste on tour – Case Study

So, what is the landfill waste generated by a show on the road? A good zero-waste technique is to start with a bin audit. Once your bin is full, spread it out on a tarp and sort it into the different materials (this won’t be gross if you’ve already separated out your food scraps). You can then see which kinds of things come up again and again, and find strategies to reduce these.

In 2023, Upu, directed by Fasitua Amosa and curated by Grace Iwashita-Taylor, toured the North Island through Tour-Makers. We asked the team to document what went into backstage rubbish bins at theatres on their tour. Whilst every production is different and some will have more consumables than others, it’s interesting to consider this as one example of a mid-size tour. The company did an excellent job of recycling and composting, so their landfill waste was minimal, but an assessment of what remained suggests:

  • Only about 10% was show consumables (cleaning gloves, tape and plastic packaging). The remaining 90% was food packaging. 

  • About half of this food packaging could potentially be cleaned for soft plastics or general recycling, or go into the compost (food-stained paper or paper towels).

  • About a quarter of this food packaging was from individual popcorn and chip packets.

Photo: Andrew Malmo

Takeaways (and takeaways…)

  • Look for any swaps you can make to reduce single-use show consumables. Start with low-hanging fruit – items that will be the easiest to replace (e.g. using Velcro for cables and trays for trip hazards).

  • Have a separate collection for soft plastic, label your bins, and make sure everyone is briefed on what goes where (e.g. paper with food on it can be composted, soft plastic can be recycled).

  • If there are lots of the same item, consider buying bulk – if lots of people are eating chips, one larger bag means less waste than several smaller ones.

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