Environmental Sustainability Policy
Last Updated: 10 December 2020
London Mozart Players is committed to fully understanding and minimising its impact upon the environment. As an orchestra with audiences across the world, we are conscious of our responsibility in order to ensure that there is always music in the world, we also need to ensure that we look after the world that our music is heard in.
This policy is an expression of our ongoing commitment as an orchestra to encourage and promote sustainable practice in all our activities. The Executive Director and leaders within the orchestra will lead in promoting its use, however the responsibility for protecting our environment belongs to all of us, and this policy forms part of our ambition to create a proactive culture of personal and corporate responsibility for our environment.
In creating this policy, significant consideration has been given to practicability, particularly whilst we continue to navigate our way through the coronavirus pandemic. As such, it must be acknowledged that there may be some instances where the execution of some elements of this policy may be constrained by adherence to government safety guidelines needed to prevent the spread of the virus.
In order to ensure we meet our commitment, we will focus on the following four areas:
- Understanding our impact
In recent years, we have undertaken audits of our activities as an orchestra to gauge the impact that our activities may be having on the environment. These audits have focused on how we travel to concerts and performances, as well as the levels of electricity used, and waste produced, by staff working in our office.
We will continue to audit our activities on an annual basis and work with local partners to ensure that we are up to date on best practice, compliant with relevant legislation and continually seeking ways to improve our performance.
- Touring
As a touring orchestra, it is our ambition to create more work that can reach and engage with as many audiences as possible. This means that much of our work does involve travel, which is one of the key areas we are monitoring with respect to our environmental impact.
Although we are a touring orchestra, many of the tours which take place domestically within the UK are managed as individual engagements. This means that we are usually able to take advantage of public transport to travel to and from venues when performing in London, and where this is not practicable we actively encourage staff and musicians to adopt lift sharing. Whilst some orchestras make use of tour buses to travel together, for us this would not significantly reduce our carbon footprint as individual members of the orchestra would still need to travel to a common meeting point first, in order to make use of the bus.
In the case of our international tours, we cannot escape the necessity of needing to fly to places such as US and the Hong Kong, but instead have made efforts to offset the carbon emissions from these activities through our partnership with the Eden Reforestation Project, through which we donate a portion of our ticket sales towards the planting of trees.
The nature of our touring engagements also means that we are in a good position to limit the amount of waste that is produced, which we are able to do by:
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- Instructing all musicians and staff to carry reusable water bottles and “keep cups” for hot drinks
- Not purchasing plastic bottled water for the orchestra en masse
- Following the recycling practices of partners and host organisations
- Encouraging the use of Fairtrade products and operating on an assumption of vegetarianism if meals are being provided
- Printing & Communications
Our biggest output in terms of printing is sheet music. Sheet music for pieces that form part of our ongoing repertoire are kept for reuse and music which is played more infrequently will often be hired and returned after use. Administrative documentation for our staff team is stored on a cloud-based system so that files can be accessed from any device without the need for printing.
Communication with our audiences are becoming increasingly digitally focused and we are seeing a reduction in the amount of print communications being disseminated, such as flyers and posters. Whilst digital communications help to reduce our use of paper, we are mindful that we also need to ensure our communications remain accessible for our audiences, many of whom are older and do not have the means to access information digitally. Where we feel it is necessary to print materials for our audiences, we will continue working with suppliers to use recycled paper where possible and ensure that materials are appropriately recycled when no longer in use.
- Materials
As a general rule, we tend to make use of the existing materials held by our host venue or partner. On the rare occasion that we require a piece of equipment not held by the venue, this will usually be transported by a member of staff or a musician who would have been travelling to the event anyway, thereby removing the need for additional travel or logistics that could increase our carbon footprint. Equally, musicians carry their own instruments and only carry what they need.
This policy shall be reviewed on an annual basis and modified to reflect current practice and new initiatives.
