Environment Policy

OUR MISSION

Since its inception in 2019, ArtBomb festival has presented works which interweave arts and ecology. Through our ambitious, playful and provocative programming, we are committed to curating artistic experiences which catalyse public engagement with climate change.

In addition to our annual ArtBomb Festival, we are lucky enough, thanks to our partnership with the Unitarian Church, to have a physical space of the same name at 60 Hall Gate, Doncaster. The ArtBomb hub is a space for local creatives to make, collaborate and develop their creative practice which, given ongoing national cuts to arts and cultural funding, is more vital than ever.

The hub also provides a platform for local and national artists to produce and exhibit work which addresses important global issues and utilizes ArtBomb’s high street location to offer creative interventions into civic space and to engage with non-traditional arts audiences.

To sustain the continual growth of ArtBomb as a multi-purpose creative hub and an integral part of Doncaster’s cultural fabric, we aim to work regeneratively. In practice, this means ensuring that ArtBomb Festival is:

an environmentally sustainable event which provokes debate and inspires positive behaviour change, beyond the festival
an event which feeds into the future development of the ArtBomb hub and its partnership with the Unitarian Church.

Our long-term environmental policy of continual improvement extends to every aspect of festival development and delivery, including our Partnerships, Technical Production, Transport & Travel for staff, artists and audiences, Accommodation for visiting artists, and Food & Drink.

Sustainable practice also informs our approach to curating the festival programme. Many of the works we present involve repurposing found materials, demonstrating to audience members how creative activities can both be environmentally friendly and financially accessible. Where installations are being purpose-built for original commissions presented at the ArtBomb shop and/or festival (for example, Apartheid Apartments by Spelling Mistakes Costs Lives and Rendition by Fiona Cahill), we consult with fellow arts organisations to develop such projects into nationally-touring works, therefore minimizing waste materials generated by one-off exhibitions.

PARTNERSHIPS

We are continually developing our relationships with local organisations and charities who share our environmental ambitions for Doncaster and the wider South Yorkshire area. These include Don Catchment Rivers Trust (DCRT), Bentley Urban Farm, North East Yorkshire Data Ecological Centre (NEYDEC) and A Commune in the North and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (Potterick Carr). For ArtBomb Festival 2025, we are proudly bringing Hard Art to Doncaster, a national collective of activists (including Charlie Waterhouse, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion), musicians (including Brian Eno) and artists who are working together to create a culture of participation and positive change. The aims of this ambitious collaboration are to bring creative, ecologically-driven activities to Doncaster which tend to be delivered in much larger cities such as London and Manchester, and to embed Doncaster and the people who live here in national conversations about positive environmental change.

TECHNICAL PRODUCTION

The magic of ArtBomb Festival is its agile nature. This is an event which spills out into the public realm, moving across Doncaster city-centre for three days. This fleet of foot and flexible approach to our programming demonstrates our ability to work reflexively and responsively to both the ever-changing arts and cultural sector and the cycles of the living planet, while also giving artists the freedom to voyage around the city and actively seek out new audiences. To align our artists with this vision, we have been working closely with many of our 2025 artists to adapt their projects into mobile works which can be presented in the street. For projects requiring electricity, this means substituting the need of conventional power sources with 12 volt batteries, greatly reducing the carbon footprint of ArtBomb Festival.

Where technical equipment needs to be purchased, such as a projector screen to make the ArtBomb Festival film programme possible, we buy items secondhand. In cases where technical equipment needs to be hired for use across multiple events within the festival programme, we coordinate the schedule to ensure that these resources can easily be shared and installed in different locations.

TRANSPORT & TRAVEL

We know that, like many live events, artist and audience travel is the biggest contributor to the total carbon emissions of ArtBomb Festival.

To minimize the negative environmental impact of our event, most of the work we present is by artists who live locally to Doncaster. In cases in which artists are travelling from abroad and flying is unavoidable, we encourage artists to choose public transport when travelling to and from the airport, and throughout their time in the UK.

To positively influence with audience travel choices, we will:

Ensure that our choice of venues included in our art trail is determined by the audiences’ capacity to walk on foot between each site, the proximity of each site to key local public transport links such as Doncaster Station and the interchange, to encourage people to travel to the festival via train, bus, bike or on foot.
Provide clear information on the ArtBomb website about the various modes of public transport that can be used to get to and from the festival. We highlight how travelling by public transport can make for a much easier, stress-free festival experience than travelling by car, while also of course acknowledging that various access needs can determine people’s travel choices.
Where financially feasible, provide a travel bursary or honorarium for casual staff, volunteers and participants to travel to and from an ArtBomb festival event using public transport.

To measure the carbon emission contribution of audience travel to ArtBomb Festival 2025, we will invite festival attendees to complete a short audience feedback survey, which will include questions about their travel choices. Such questions will include:

Where have you travelled from today? (Name of town/ postcode)
How did you travel here? (Multiple choice responses: Walk, Bicycle, Bus, Train, Taxi, Car)
If you travelled by car today, what do you think we could do differently to encourage you to use public transport instead?*

*Audience suggestions here may include partnering with a local public transport provider to offer free/ discounted travel tickets, encouraging car sharing by registering ArtBomb on online services such as Liftshare.com, rewarding audiences for travelling by foot, bike or train rather than driving with a discounted drink or meal at a local cafe. Timber Festival, produced by Wild Rumpus CIC, is a fantastic case study for incentivizing greener ways of travelling to a festival or large-scale outdoor event. In 2024, they offered a pick-up service from the train station and a “Green Wristband” system which “provides 10% off Timber merch and selected vendors on site. You will also be entered into our competition to win a session in the woodland sauna”.

ACCOMMODATION

We also consider environmental impact when choosing accommodation for artists, and we always select accommodation options based on their proximity to the ArtBomb hub (i.e. walking distance or a short bus journey away).

Recognising that hotel chains tend to have significant impact in terms of energy usage, ArtBomb aims to partner with independent Airbnbs instead of hotel chains as artist hosts. We choose locations which can comfortably accommodate multiple guests at a time to encourage sharing of resources and minimal energy usage. For our 2022 festival, we hosted many of our artists at A Commune in the North, an egalitarian residential community located in Bentley which collectivizes resources (income, wealth, food, shelter, etc) so they are equally accessible, and shares collective responsibilities equitably (work, care, tasks, debt, etc).

While always ensuring that we meet the travel and accommodation access needs of all of our artists, we encourage artists to consider staying in places like this, and to play an active role in our ambition to reduce the negative environmental impact of festival production.

FOOD & DRINK

Food and drink catering is not a crucial part of ArtBomb Festival’s offer. Nevertheless, for ArtBomb 2025, we plan to partner with a handful of local cafes, food vendors and bars to provide a selection of discounted food and drinks as a way to incentivize completion of our audience survey while also encouraging our festival audience to support local businesses while attending ArtBomb festival. We will be choosing these partners based on the quality and variety of their meat-free offer, as a crude mechanism for encouraging audiences to choose meat-free options while attending our festival.

We will be providing food at our festival launch event and a final communal meal for everyone involved in the making of the festival (invitation only). In line with our advocacy for eating seasonally, locally and varied, we will be working with a local chef to provide a vegetarian Lebanese catering for these events using ingredients (where seasonally viable) sourced from local food producers.

FUTURE PROOFING

Working collaboratively with the Unitarian Church, we want to make sure that any new materials used or infrastructures put in place for festival projects hosted on church grounds contribute towards the ongoing development of the church as a vibrant, safe and welcoming space where different community groups in Doncaster can gather on a regular basis and which can be used to host a diverse range of activities.

To achieve this, practical measures need to be taken to improve the environmental performance of the building, such as heating and ventilation, developments which are built into the church’s investment plans.

Regarding the materials & infrastructure being used for ArtBomb Festival 2025, we will be investing in a permanent blackoutting solution for the main church hall in order to present Ray Lee’s Siren, a nationally-touring audio visual installation, at the festival. This will ensure that cheap, temporary and single-use blackout materials, such as bin liners, will not be used. More significantly, the churches’ offer as a venue and activity space will expand massively, opening up possibilities for large scale music events, conferences and film screenings at any time of day, and future-proofing the venue.