We’re midway through our involvement in Cultural Adaptations and delighted with the explorations and discussions happening between ourselves and our partners and with our embedded artists and Codema.
This project is a new initiative for us and is our first deep dive into the area of both climate adaptation and mitigation.
At the beginning of this year the team in axis took the decision to expand our actions in line with this and launched a new “axis goes green” initiative. Our involvement in Cultural Adaptations has certainly been a trigger for this so we’re taking small steps that we hope will lead to big change and we’re excited. There is a lot going on in this field now in Ireland with Green Arts Ireland, which is run by Theatre Forum and Catri?ona Fallon, under the guidance of the Cultural Adaptations lead partner, Creative Carbon Scotland.
Thus, at axis in 2020 we are going to reduce the amount of event guides we print, saving the huge amount of paper they use – 650000 A4 PAGES PER YEAR! For this season we will no longer be distributing them door to door, as we found a lot of waste builds up and the guides were being lost or forgotten. Information on our shows, classes and projects is at your fingertips through social media; we’re keeping our channels updated. News and event and competitions and all our events and event guide will be available to all on our website www.axisballymun.ie. We will have some printed guides in-house for those who are not online.
On the café side of our business, we are only selling drinks in cans (no more plastic bottles). We have phased out polystyrene packaging in our café and all packaging, even straws, are compostable. We are also in the process of reducing single-use cups and that will be coming into play after Easter.
That’s not all! We have applied for capital funding to change all the lighting in the building to LED and to develop our heating system in a more carbon-efficient way. These are changes we hope to develop in the coming months.
This, coupled with the amazing conversations and the fact that adaptation is now a key part of all our programming conversations, has shown the huge benefit of this project to us thus far. And we’re only halfway!”
Mark O’Brien
axis director
