Getting Environmental

Here at V Festival Australia we take good environmental practice as seriously as we take good music and good fun! And that is serious!

One tip that we would like to share is that being environmentally friendly at a big event doesn't have to take one scrap of fun out of the day as long as the rest of the scraps go where they should.

This year you will find we have taken a fantastic leap forward with a range of new initiatives underway to build upon our environmental successes from last year. We scored good ticks last year from the Initial Environmental Reviews of our inaugural Sydney and Gold Coast V festival events so we are keen to get stuck into it all again. At V Festival 2008 we will have Initial reviews carried out at our two new sites in Melbourne and Perth and full Environmental Audits at our original two sites.

Multi-year Environment Management Plan *

Our Environment Management Plan (EMP) incorporates a rolling action plan with an annual cycle of review and a budget allocation. The Annual Action Plan has been drawn from this and is in turn what provides the mechanism for implementation of the V Festival Environment Policy which you can view HERE.

The purpose of the EMP is to:
Identify priorities
Set objectives and targets
Define performance indicators
Document strategies and time frames to achieve targets
Allocate responsibilities and identify the necessary resources to enable realisation of the overall plan
Establish mechanisms to monitor evaluate and report progress.

In addition to our Annual Action Plan these are some of the key initiatives we have undertaken for the 2008 events:

Use of Renewable Energy

V Festival will in 2008 achieve our goal of running a large proportion of our events on Renewable Energy.
A large percentage of our onsite generators and over 95% of our Sydney will be running on biodiesel this year. A big step up from last year. This initiative alone will not only give us a fantastic head start on our goal to be carbon neutral and to address global climate change but it will also provide us with excellent local air quality improvements at the events.

Renewable energy generated directly on site from solar power

In addition to the biodiesel powered generators across Australia, in Sydney as part of our commitment to EarthHour we will also be generating our own renewable energy on site through the use of photovoltaic (photo=light, voltaic=electricity) panels.

V Festival would like to thank Planetec Electrical Pty Ltd for providing our on site solar power systems. Planetec is a leading Australian company for renewable energy systems, specialising in grid and stand alone power plants that save thousands of kilograms of carbon dioxide gases from entering our precious atmosphere. Also thanks to Schott for supplying the high quality solar panels and Conergy for providing the inverters which tell us how much clean, green energy we have generated on site at V Festival. Thanks guys!

http://www.planetec.com.au/
http://www.schottsolar.com/
http://www.conergy.com.au/

Keep your eye out for our solar panels on site in Sydney!

Minimum Waste Event

Each of the 4 V Festival events around Australia are being registered as ‘Waste Wise Events’, a National program that guidance and assistance to ensure that we achieve our objective of meeting best practice guidelines in this area. In order to achieve this we are partnering with local councils and regional waste education organisations in each city to ensure that we are doing everything that we can in any given area.

To help us to reach our goals we are also partnering with various food distribution charities and also with the Australian Biofuel Users network who will be picking up our used cooking oil from the events and turning it into fuel to ensure that we don’t waste a drop.

Waste Management Education

V Festival is delighted to be working closely with our lead charity partner ActNow to get our Waste Management and other Environmental messages out to the Festival goers and to the broader community.

Travel & Transport Initiatives

Each of venues has been chosen for a number of reasons and one of those has included its capacity to provide either direct access to existing Public Transport or to establish a shuttle bus service from other areas. As the Touring Party moves around the country from gig to gig it will also be seeking to minimise its vehicle use.

Carbon Neutral Event

When all is said and done, and we’ve reduced the Festival’s emissions as much as was practically possible for us this year, we’re taking a multifaceted approach to how we offset our emissions. We are working with another Premier Partner of Earth Hour, Climate Friendly, to purchase renewable energy carbon credits that will also assist with technology transfer to the developing world. In addition to this we’re also investing in specific V Festival projects in our local area including a tree planting program to create biodiversity corridors and absorb greenhouse gases, and are making a donation to the Centennial Park Foundation for re-investment in the Parklands as a vital urban greenspace.

Carbon Neutral Ticketing *

Also as part of our efforts to be a carbon neutral event we are working with Ticketmaster, our ticketing partner for the tour, to ensure that the ticketing exercise is also carbon neutral.

Supporting the global Earth Hour campaign

V Festival is partnering with Earth Hour to help spread their message and inspire people everyday to make changes that will help to achieve Earth Hour's ultimate goal of reducing emissions by 5%. The Sydney V Festival is a premier event for Earth Hour on 29 March 2008, and in other locations we will help to boost awareness of this great campaign as Earth Hour pushes to go global.

Establishing a Continual Improvement Cycle *

Despite all this our bottom line is:
We aren’t perfect but we are doing everything that we can this year and things that we can’t manage for 2008 have been included into our list of projects for 2009 as part of our Continual Improvement Cycle. The cycle is to: ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act …’. This is an integral element of the ISO14004 Standard for Environmental Management that we are using to guide us on our journey towards the best V Festival ever.

What is all the fuss about?

Most of us now have well and truly heard the message from the world's scientists about Climate Change and the other related issues such as the fact that we are virtually drowning in waste and the fact that we are losing our biodiversity at an increasing rate. We reckon the debate is over and that it's time to simply make the changes that we want to see.

If you want to learn more about the 'State of the Environment' then you can go here: www.environment.gov.au/soe

If you are curious about what everyone else thinks and who actually gives a hoot about the environment then click here: www.environment.nsw.gov.au/whocares

Earth Hour

V Festival is partnering with Earth Hour to help spread their message and inspire people everyday to make changes that will help to achieve Earth Hour's ultimate goal of reducing emissions by 5%. The Sydney V Festival is a premiere event for Earth Hour on 29 March 2008, and in other locations we will help to boost awareness of this great campaign as Earth Hour pushes to go global.

http://www.earthhour.org

As people who really care about what is going on around this world of ours we want to give two big thumbs up to our friends from the other Festivals, Tours and big events around the country that are also starting to address the environmental impacts that our great parties can cause. We have listened to you and hopefully others have too because our new environmental push is here to stay!

We like to think that we can work towards a point where you will actually be reducing your personal ecological footprint by coming out to play with us. An 'Ecological Footprint' for a person or a household or a business or any definable entity is a measure of how much productive land we require to support our current lifestyle. At the moment we (globally) are using about 20% more planet than we have so it doesn't take a genius to work out that this can't go on. So get stuck into some good tunes and get ready to roll up your sleeves for mother earth people!

To find out more and to work out what YOUR Ecological Footprint is check out this great site and use the calculators that you can find in there:

http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/ecologicalfootprint

So how has V Festival Australia decided to do it?

The approach that the Aussie V Fest crew has decided to take is to be systematic, to create strong foundations for change this year and to also develop a strategically planned framework for continuous environmental improvement. Sometimes it is easy to just do whatever good things spring to mind but we want to make sure that we don't lose our momentum and keep getting better and better until we have achieved our goals.

Environment Policy

Any effective Environmental Management System starts with a good Environment Policy. We have prepared an Environment Policy that we are proud of. Please have a look and let us know what you think too.

Aiming for environmental best practice

To achieve this we believe that it will take nothing less than the integration of environmental responsibility into all aspects of our operations. We are setting environmental objectives and targets for ourselves and to achieve them we are developing and implementing environmental action plans and procedures.

Not long after the last bleary eyed festival goer from V Festival 2008 has wandered off to who knows where our new Environment Committee will review and evaluate how we performed and then set goals for further improvement next year. Cool huh?!

More to 'sustainability' than environmental concerns?

We couldn't agree with you more.

Sustainability is like a three legged stool. If you forget to support one of the legs you will shortly afterwards wind up on your bum.

We think that having our operations run as environmentally friendly as possible will help our business triple bottom lines as well. With the help of our 2008 partners Virgin Unite and ActNow we are demonstrating our concern for social and environmental issues, both locally and globally.

Virgin Unite: www.virginunite.com

ActNow: www.actnow.com.au

If you would like to learn more for yourself about what Triple Bottom Line then here is a wiki to start you off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line

What operational areas are we focusing on?

We are endeavoring to cover the full spectrum of our activities, but our first priorities are as follows:


For details on how we are making valuable changes in these areas keep checking back on these pages over the coming weeks as we unveil all our plans and announce a few more exciting initiatives we have in store.

Also, keep your eyes out for the Sustainability Support Crew at your local event! They will be helping with the Environmental Audit and will be looking for people to chat with and to record comments from on our environmental performance for 2008. If you have any suggestions then we would love to hear them.

See you at V Festival - the best festival of the season!