Our Commitment to Sustainability
Wise Children have an active commitment to best practice in environmental sustainability, ensuring that environmental concerns are part of our decision-making, and that all staff members understand and contribute to achieving our goals.
We are committed to reducing our carbon impact and have set the following targets for 2025:
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All core staff trained in Carbon Literacy.
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Senior Management to complete Pathway to Net-Zero training with a view to our new home, The Lucky Chance, operating at net zero.
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Continuing detailed carbon footprinting and reporting to better understand our impact and ways to reduce it.
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Continue working towards the standards of the Theatre Green Book
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Sharing our journey and working with peers to be part of revolutionising the industry.
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Continue to develop robust storage and cataloguing process in order to promote reuse of our existing assets, both in our own work and externally.
Productions
We are working towards the baseline standard of the Theatre Green Book. The Theatre Green Book offers guidance on best practice, with the aim of sustainability becoming integral to production processes.
We aim to:
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Embed the Theatre Green Book approach.
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Support a Green Team within the organisation to help promote the TGB approach, contribute to achieving the organisations environmental goals and make sure the aims are understood by all employees.
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Set concepts, budgets and schedules to support sustainable practice.
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Eliminate the use of unsustainable and harmful materials and chemicals.
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Ensure all new materials are sustainably sourced.
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Ensure 100% of plastics are reusable, recyclable or compostable.
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Ensure 50% or more of materials used in a production (set, props, costumes etc) have had a previous life.
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Ensure 65% of production materials are re-used or recycled post-production.
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To reduce the impact of our activity across all technical departments.
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Minimise deliveries and opt for sustainable transport options.
Using What We Have
Our biggest action to date, and that which is likely to have the most significant impact on our footprint, was the EPIC undertaking of collating all of our set, costume and prop assets from various storage units across the country into one, easily accessible, storage unit in Frome. We now rent a fantastic industrial unit which houses all our shows and stock. Productions which are unlikely to see a future life have been broken down and will soon be catalogued to create a brilliant resource for Training Programmes, R&Ds, future shows and external hirers. It has already been instrumental in the revival of The Little Match Girl and our new production of North by Northwest, with many of the ‘new’ materials and costumes required being sourced from our existing stock. The task of storing everything in a way which is easy to navigate and promotes reuse is ongoing, but the rewards to our sustainable practice are already evident.
Where have the old sets gone?
In relocating our assets to Frome, the opportunity arose to donate parts of old props and sets to other artists and projects.
Rob Higgs, mechanical sculptor, automata maker, inventor and environmental activist has created the workshop pictured using many items and materials donated from old sets.
Ensuring our teams understand and contribute to the goal...
A large part of our sustainable strategy focuses on employee buy-in: embedding sustainable values and goals in our teams, and getting everyone on board to champion our aims and be part of Wise Children’s progress. To support this, from The Little Match Girl and North by Northwest onwards, we have introduced a contract clause relating to our environmental aims, and each person signs a ‘Green Production Agreement’ committing to sustainable thinking and encouraging ideas and actions to help create positive change.
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Sustainability in Action
North by Northwest 2025
We love to promote re-using stuff at Wise Children.
We needed hundreds of 1950s and ‘60s suits and other formal clothing to create the set of North by Northwest, and turned to our audiences and supporters for help, putting a call out for any unused clothing that screams "Roger Thornhill", giving it a new lease of life on stage in the show.
The Lucky Chance
Our journey to net-zero
Since 2022, we’ve been based at The Lucky Chance in Frome, an old Methodist church which we have slowly and lovingly brought back into use. We are committed to developing our home sustainably, and with the intention of it operating as a net zero building in the future.
We are on the pathway to net-zero, a journey which we plan to document and share.
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So far we are:
- 100% electric.
- Powered by Ecotricity, providing 100% green energy.
