The Really Good Bar Company wins “Green Supplier of the Year” at the Event Production Awards 2020
Back in the winter of 2018, Clean Earth Collective and The Really Good Bar Company started talking about the issues around festival CO2 emissions and the volume of single use plastic waste generated at UK music festivals. Our collaboration resulted in RGB been awarded ‘Green Supplier of the Year’ at the Event Production Awards for our climate positive work during the 2019 summer event season.
Recognised for their pioneering green policies and processes at this prestigious event not only for their own business but also three of their collaborative festival partners – making them a Climate Positive powerhouse this is an important accolade for RGB.
“The events The Really Good Bar Company are involved with push for greener, better environment and sustainability. The Really Good Bar Company ensure this and go beyond the expectation from organisers. The legacy and delivery is second to none.” – Event Production Awards 2020
Now in its tenth year, the Event Production Awards recognise the talents behind the successful delivery of outdoor and live events. The event took place at Novotel West in London and played host to around 500 industry leaders in February 2020.
RGB is an established festival bar operator of over 10 years which runs the full bar operations at several medium sized UK music festivals including End of the Road, 2000 Trees & ArcTanGent.
In the 2019 summer season RGB made definitive administrative, financial and collaborative steps in committing to be Climate Positive by the end of the year. The business already has several important initiatives in place to reduce carbon emissions, such as mainly working with local stock suppliers, running their own haulage (including stock collections), encouraging bar staff carshare schemes, recycling all packaging waste and had stopped single use plastic going across their bars.
Clean Earth Collective helped to manage the onsite reusable cup schemes and to audit RGB’s business as well as that of their festival partners. By introducing a non branded reusable cup scheme, the bars generated a separate revenue stream to cover the costs of all the drinks cups (cup hire, transport, storage, cleaning, movement around site) as well as the costs of auditing and offsetting the events they worked at.
The Clean Earth Collective and RGB worked with reusable cup supplier Green Goblet and used their hire cups that are not festival branded and so have a longer life cycle and reused at many events throughout the summer.
A representative from Clean Earth Collective attended the events in question and arrived on site several days before it went live to gather data from suppliers and traders for the audit. Post-event this data was analysed and the carbon emissions from the event calculated.
Clean Earth Collective purchased Gold Standard UN approved carbon credits to offset the unavoidable emissions of the events. In all cases this was increased by 100-300% which created the UK’s first Climate Positive music festivals.
“We are absolutely over the moon about this awards, and couldn’t have done this without our partners and our amazing team. It has been a huge effort, but one we think is absolutely vital. We have always taken our environmental responsibilities seriously and have always done our best to minimise the business’ negative impact. We are privileged to work in an forward-thinking industry and its exciting to see festivals and their suppliers leading the way in environmental developments and industry sustainability.” The Really Good Bar Company
The Clean Earth Collective believe that for festivals and events to reach carbon negative status, they should encourage all suppliers in their supply chain to also become carbon negative as this would have a huge knock on impact to the UK and international event sector.