Photo of The Commons by Tod Jones
In this blog, Eman writes about:
- How Spectra’s work impacts the environment and how we share this with others
- What resources we use in projects – often they’ve been used before or can be used again
- Spectra’s carbon emissions and how we balance them or plan to reduce them in the future
- How we want everyone who works with Spectra to understand the Action Plan
Over the last two years, we’ve developed our Environmental Action Plan as one way we can evidence our commitment to climate justice to a wider audience.
Over on our newsletter, Instagram and LinkedIn, we’ve introduced this quarter’s theme of Co-Creation: What does it mean to us and how does it inform future plans? This question forms a central pillar of our Environmental Action – all staff members have individual responsibilities that feed into our collective goals, and twice a year we all check in on action plan progress to make sure we are on track.
So far, we’ve achieved (and continue to embed) the following:
Reporting and Sharing
- Quarterly progress report to the Board
- Regular sharing of updates on social media and our blog
- Continued learning through attendance at events (e.g. Culture Shift Symposium at MAC), quarterly Environmental Book Club, Sustainable Arts West Midlands meetings and Julie’s Bicycle Board Environmental Champion meetings.
- In 2025, our Book Club has read Care Work, Is A River Alive?, and watched a series of videos.
Materials
- Approximately 50% of materials for The Commons had a previous life or were natural materials (e.g. responsibly sourced coppiced wood and plants)
- All newly acquired materials have a future life.
- Up-to-date storage inventory created to ensure items are reused wherever possible
- Careful consideration of the supply chain to ensure our choices are not enabling modern slavery practices
Data and Finance
- Use a carbon calculator for our website and use recommendations to reduce environmental impact. We are in the process of removing draft pages and excess images.
- Our stance on AI is that we will not use it as an organisation, and we will request that Meta do not use our content to train generative AI.
- An annual £250 Strategic Climate Fund in our core budget to support a local organisation which is taking immediate action to manage climate change.
- We supported Growing Up Green in Year 1
- Our staff, board and steering group voted to support Crick Gardens in Year 2
- Collection of data on business travel, energy use and procurement for annual reporting via Julie’s Bicycle
- Year 1 of tracking carbon emissions came to 2 tonnes CO2e, and Year 2 came to 4 tonnes CO2e. We believe there are a number of reasons for this increased emissions output. Our activity doubled in Year 2, thereby doubling our artist travel, which was the largest contributor to our emissions. We also tracked emissions for a materials inventory for The Commons, something we didn’t do for the much smaller garden project in Year 1, Buzz Stop.
- These garden projects also serve to sequester some carbon and contribute positively to the biodiversity of the area, so, on balance, we believe these emissions to be justifiable.
Moving forward
Theatre Green Book
We have signed up to Theatre Green Book with aims to achieve ‘Basic’ level for Operations and for our 2026 Production R&D. We have so far completed the Preliminary level and have an action plan in place.
Website
After researching sustainable website hosting, we have decided that it will be too time-consuming for our small, part-time team to make a switch from WordPress right now. Instead, we are implementing other measures to reduce the emissions produced by our digital activity, including: exploration of alternatives to Google Mail and Drive; defining Spectra’s stance on AI use; and tidying up the back end of the website so that it uses less data.
Procurement
We aim for 60% of all materials for every project to have had a previous life, and that any new materials are sustainably sourced wherever possible. 100% of the plastics we use will be reusable, recyclable or compostable.
Evaluation
We want to evaluate the environmental impact of each project at the end of its life, as part of a new staff debrief process, and share this evaluation with project partners.
Funding
We continue to actively seek out relationships with people and organisations whose values align with ours and who are committed to taking responsibility for environmental impact. This year so far, that has included building a relationship with Fruit & Nut Village.
Internal communication
We want all workers to understand the Environmental Policy and Action Plan from the start of the contract, ensuring shared responsibility. To make sure this happens, it has been included in the onboarding process for staff, and we are working on a way to embed it in onboarding for freelancers.
To read our plans and progress in more detail, you can find the 2025-26 Action Plan below. If you would like to work with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch.