By Emily Shephard, Insights Lead, isla
When we talk to organisers about their carbon, the conversation often starts and gets stuck with travel. Which, looking at the numbers, makes sense. Audience travel dominates the footprint of nearly every event. But it’s the part you have least control over.
When audience travel is removed, emissions from materials jump to 27% of what’s left. Also remove staff travel, and materials account for 31% of controllable footprint. This makes materials a priority, and the focus of our first ‘A Closer Look’ report.
Single-use is a design problem
The instinct, when you want to do better, is to swap materials. Less plastic, more wood, lower-carbon everything. Which helps. But it only gets you so far. What shows up clearly in the data isn’t what the materials are made of. It’s how much of it there is, and how few times it gets used. That shifts the focus onto the brief, rather than single swaps for often pricier alternatives.
Of the 6,400 lines of data in TRACE, 84% of the materials we measured are virgin. That’s around 2.7 tonnes of brand-new material for every event. And most of it is only ever used once. 42% of build materials are used once; for graphics it’s 69%. It’s a design problem with a design solution: the outcome is decided long before anyone loads a truck.
Single-use gets designed in at the planning stage, which means it can and should be designed out there too. Questions such as: can this be hired? Can it be reused from the last event, or at the next? If we’re buying it, where does it go afterwards? Building a sourcing hierarchy into the brief is a good place to start: hire or reuse first, recycled content next, virgin as a last resort. Then do the same for the end of life. Confirm where a material is going before it’s ordered, because if you can’t say where it ends up, it ends up in the bin. All of it is within your control, but only if you ask early enough.
Without carpet, we’re brushing sustainability under the rug
Carpet, for most, is where to start. It’s the top-emitting build material, 78% of it is laid once and never used again. Talk about materials and skip carpet, and we’re acting for appearances, not real reductions.
This doesn’t mean just about banning it. Carpet has a function: it absorbs sound, supports accessibility, sets the tone of a space the moment you walk in. The real question is how to stop using it once, or design spaces that don’t need it at all. 15% of the carpet measured was recycled, which is a start, but recycling only fixes the sourcing, not the onward life, keeping to a linear system rather than a circular one. The bigger prize is a second life for the carpet itself, ideally still on a floor doing the job it was made for.
Designing for less pays for itself
Here’s the part that makes this an easy call: designing for less material, and lower-impact material, frees up budget.
Disposal is the clearest cost line to address. The single-use material in our dataset comes to 1,229 tonnes, thrown away at an average £292 per tonne. That’s a disposal bill approaching half a million pounds for materials used for a few days.
That virgin material, destined for the bins, also costs to move it. Volume and weight become important here: the 1,255 tonnes of wood in our dataset generates 1.86 tCO₂e moved just 10km, and when moved roughly 400km, London to Frankfurt, transport emissions overtake the emissions from the material itself.
Both of those costs, the transport and the disposal, also come after the original cost of material. That’s 3 line items to save budget against.
Getting more efficient in your material use means buying less, transporting less, and binning less, saving both carbon and cost. That’s money you can put back into the event, your team, or invest into the carbon reductions that actually need investment.
Where to start
Use less first: the most sustainable material is the one you never ordered. Then design smart with what’s left: lower-impact alternatives exist for most standard materials, and many perform as well or better, so measure what you use and swap where it counts.
Understand onward life before it happens, not after. Decide where a material goes before you order it, write it into the brief rather than the debrief, hold your suppliers to the same standard.
Start there and you’ll begin to see your impact reducing as well as your bill.
You can access the full report at https://weareisla.co.uk/guide/a-closer-look-materials/