Our Sustainability Policy 2025

By nature festivals tend to be temporary communities, which can have an environmental impact that easily outlasts their season, we take this very seriously. However, we are fortunate at The Festival Theatre as we work on the environmentally sustainable estate at Hever Castle, which means that we are able to embrace many of their long-lasting principles, as well as implementing some ideas unique to our events.  

The Festival Theatre, from conception, has been intrinsically linked to this spectacular, grade 2 listed, award winning great garden of Kent, in which we celebrate our environment wholeheartedly. 

Our sustainability policy is ongoing, and regularly reviewed to ensure it remains current and to reach the best, most achievable, standards we can. We have been working on and implementing our strategy for serval years. This is where we are to date. 

Climate and carbon 

Hever Castle has a substantial commitment to site-specific sustainability. From single use plastic to biomass heating, the Festival are fortunate to be able to embrace it all. You can read more about the Castle’s Sustainability policy here.

Technical Department 

Our technical team, Visual Elements Ltd have been committed to technical sustainable practices for years, leading the way in many, particularly lighting inovation. By nature, this is a fast-changing area in sustainability practice. They implement the most current practice across our events, as well as in the building of our new structure. You can read more about Visual Elements Sustainability policy here.

Transport 

As a festival in a rural location with almost no public transport options (particularly for our evening events), we know that most of our visitors come by car. New for 2025 we are going to encourage car-sharing between our audience members and staff and will be setting up a Facebook page for ease of signing up to offer, or request, this sharing opportunity amongst our attendees. 

We will also encourage cyclists with information on where to lock bikes and cycle routes (due to where we are on the estate, walking to the venue is more difficult). 

Waste 

For the last 5 years we have encouraged our audiences to take their rubbish home with them. Before this time, we were throwing away many bags of mixed rubbish at each event. Now our audiences take their rubbish home to re-use or recycle. Picnic leftovers can be delicious! 

For any other rubbish generated (which is very little) we recycle on site, in daylight. 

Social impact 

Community 

One of our core values is to have a positive impact on our community, both those who visit our events, and those who live around us. 

Noise pollution from our sound systems, and vehicles can be detrimental to local wildlife and residents. We regularly test the levels of our amplified sound, both with sound level readers to ensure we are within the limits, and moving around the site to listen ourselves to ensure we are causing the least disturbance. Our performances all finish at a pre-agreed reasonable hour for the traffic to pass the homes of the residents on the estate and further afield. We write our finish times into our artists contracts.  

We never use fireworks or pyrotechnics and very rarely generators (the last time was years ago 4 years when we moved on the site during the pandemic, just to light the car park). 

Engaging with the local community 

We constantly look at where we can continue to enhance our positive impact within the community. We offer schools prizes, community discounts and free tickets. We take work out into the community to Hever Church and work with community groups in the area to encourage engagement with their festival on their doorstep. 

Volunteers 

The festival volunteer team is the backbone of all we do. Their local community knowledge and engagement is invaluable, and they are all local themselves which reduces our staff carbon footprint, with many of them also sharing lifts.  

Box Office 

Advise is freely given on our sustainability policy and ways for our audience to participate in it most fully.  

We offer virtual tickets as standard, where we will ask for them not to be printed. 

Our festival posters and banners are re-usable each year. Only being replaced when they are beyond repair. Paper print is kept to a minimum, used for as long as possible and printed on sustainable and recyclable paper. 

Our festival team have been trained on the Kent and Medway Environmental Sustainability course and have been awarded the Carbon Literacy Certificate.