As planning for this year’s Showman’s Show, held at Newbury Showground, from 17th– 18thOctober, gets well underway, organiser Lance Show & Publications Limited has announced a raft of sustainable initiatives that it is undertaking for the 2018 event. These include taking steps to reduce the Show’s own carbon footprint and promoting sustainability to the wider event industry.

The Showman’s Show team has always been conscious of sustainability, the 2017 event was recognised by the newly launched Greener Event Award, by A Greener Festival. Greener Event Awards are given to non-festival events, including: conferences, multi-venue shows, AGMs and sporting events. It acknowledged that the Showman’s Show 2017 had made great strides in improving its environmental impact, which is very much something that the team intends to build upon this time around.

Having recently signed up to Energy Revolution as a supplier member, the Showman’s Show intends to tackle CO2 emissions by balancing its company travel miles with direct investment in clean renewable energy. Energy Revolution is an unprecedented collaboration of festival organisers that gives an industry response to the critical challenge of climate change. It focuses on tackling the carbon emissions from travel, so it can have the biggest possible impact, by giving festivalgoers the option to account for their carbon emissions from journeys to and from festivals by supporting a renewable energy project when they buy their tickets.

In addition, The Showman’s Show will also be encouraging visitors and exhibitors to make use of the GoCarShare scheme that it introduced back in 2017. Popular with festival and sporting event goers who find that the service, where drivers link up with passengers, with the latter paying a contribution to the trip, is a great way to be kind to the environment and take the hassle out of travelling.

A Vision:2025 hosted event will also make a welcome return to the Showground on the afternoon of Wednesday 17th October with another varied and packed programme of event sustainability content. There are also plans to introduce an additional session on Thursday 18thOctober looking specifically at reducing the use of plastic in the industry.

The Showman’s Show intends to encourage all contractors, exhibitors and visitors to bring along their own re-usable water bottles and is looking to remove one off plastic water bottles from its own catering outlets if possible.

Commenting on the sustainable initiatives already in place for the Showman’s Show 2018, event director, Johnny Lance said: “Over the last four or five months you haven’t been able to pick up a newspaper or go online without seeing a story surrounding sustainability and in particular reducing single-use plastics. Indeed, many of the stories have featured event and festival organisers and their own plans to improve their environmental impact. It is vital that we also play our part and where possible help lead sea changes in our wider event industry. I think that if we weren’t looking at all the sustainable options that are available and trying to implement and encourage them at the Showman’s Show, then questions, quite rightly, would be asked.

“Being recognised with a Greener Event Award and signing up to schemes such as Energy Revolution and GoCarShare are important phases in the development of the Show. We’re also thrilled to be hosting another Festival Vision:2025 meeting and excited about plans to bring visitors dedicated content on the reduction of single-use plastics. All of which are at the early planning stages and we’ll share more news and details in the coming months as they take shape.”

Adam Parry
Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.