SUSTAINABILITY

Our beautiful home of Wimborne St Giles is situated in an Area of Outstanding National Beauty.

Protecting and celebrating this site – home to rich biodiversity, important ecological and archaeological sites and one of 21 international dark skies areas – brought a new focus to our sustainability aims for We Out Here.

In 2023, we worked with A Greener Future (AGF). AGF is a not-for-profit company that helps organisations, events, festivals and venues worldwide to be more sustainable and reduce environmental impacts. They are founders of the world’s first green event and festival certification and provide training, expertise, support, carbon footprint and Net Zero strategy, and facilitate exchange through events and networking.

Through AGF, We Out Here undertook stringent monitoring and assessment. We were issued yearly data on our performance, and suggestions on how we can improve.

In 2023 we were awarded overall **Improvers (**with Commended in the Local Environments category, and Outstanding in Local Community).

We’ll use this reporting in our event going forward and share with you all developments in each area.

Biodiversity

WOH’s new home is also home to rich biodiversity, which was a key focus for us first to understand and take steps to protect. Throughout the year we worked closely with the St Giles Estate, who have had an existing extensive ecological monitoring programme in place. The estate has its own ecologist and has an ecological monitoring report bringing together the details of all the surveyed plant, insect, bird and mammal species across the site. Among key species are Greater horseshoe bats which have been monitored across the estate for 25 years plus eight other bat species. 18 species of butterfly were identified in a km survey area in 2022 and nine species of damselflies

The estate includes two Special Sites of Scientific Interest (SSSIs), 16 Sites of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCIs), five Ancient Semi-Natural Woodlands (ASNWs), one Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT) Reserve, one Veteran Tree Site, two veteran London plane trees, eight ancient Yew trees and one ancient Horse chestnut, plus around 16 different habitat types and six priority habitats. Liaising with the site, we worked to protect these identified areas.

This context helped us develop our heritage and ecology management policy which outlines our approach to protecting ecosystems and biodiversity. A key element was managing lighting (as explained in ‘Dark Skies’). And to ensure we could provide wild swimming we had this signed off by the site ecologist as having minimal impact on species. Across the estate, the landowner Nick is involved in many environmental stewardship schemes to restore and enhance the habitats and biodiversity of the site.

Dark Skies

Our WOH home is lucky to be located within Cranborne Chase, the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the country to be designated as an ‘International Dark Sky Reserve’. These reserves are protected for their exceptional quality of starry nights. 

Last year we worked closely with the Cranborne Chase team to understand and protect the starry nights over the festival. You might have noticed our lights had colourful hats on this year: this was a creative solution from the team to reduce light pollution – 2,800 cones fitted on 9km of festoon – all by hand! Our staging teams also worked hard to reduce any upward throw of light at night.

We are delighted to share that thanks to this, we are now officially ‘Dark Sky Friendly’, with 3* accreditation awarded by the Cranborne team. We’re looking forward to building on this success, and have even more in place for everyone to enjoy the unique setting of our beautiful site.

Food & Drink

We welcome a carefully curated selection of quality food & drink options on-site at We Out Here, with a focus on great quality food, but also on traders who pay fair living wages, support charities or initiatives, and use sustainable packaging and products.

Last year we welcomed 38 food and beverage traders on site. Sustainability was taken into account in the trader application questionnaire and traders were requested to use compostable serveware on site. 

The split of food offerings were as follows:

% of vegan / vegetarian food stalls34.15%
% of mixed food stalls (vegan / vegetarian / meat)65.85%
% of meat only food stalls4.88%
% of local / seasonal food stalls21.95%

Sustainable Travel

Audience travel to a festival constitutes on average 68% of the event’s emissions. In theory, a simple way to reduce our overall emissions is to ensure as many customers, staff & artists travel sustainably.

We encourage our customers to use public transport options where possible: we run Train Station Shuttles from Salisbury Station to the site and also run carbon-offset coach travel from major cities around the UK.  We also ran a popular Charity Bike Ride from Bournemouth to We Out Here, with over 40 people taking part.

If you are driving and don’t have a full car, we encourage using Liftshare to spread the impact and make some early festival friends!

See all the travel options here.

Waste

UK music festivals produce 23,500 tonnes of waste every year.

It’s sadly estimated that 68% of waste created at UK festivals ends up in landfill, even though much of it could be recycled.

We are happy to share that in 2023, We Out Here sent 0 waste to landfill!

Our policy concerning waste is as follows:

PREVENT:

  • Preventing waste from being generated in the first place, by using fewer materials when planning and developing our events.

REPURPOSE & REUSE

  • Repurpose and reuse items by using them in other events or by donating them to charities and community projects.

RECYCLE

  • Recycling as much as possible and turning items into new products and materials, by giving our staff and attendees the necessary information and equipment to recycle properly. Our waste management team sorts all the recycling before it gets distributed.

RESPONSIBLE DISPOSAL

  • Disposing of waste responsibly, avoiding landfills wherever possible

We also ask all of our customers to Leave No Trace, and take all you bring away with you.

Let’s respect this beautiful site and ensure we keep it that way.

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