Angier from Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ talks about the importance of magic, stating that
“The audience knows the truth- that the world is simple. Miserable. Solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, you could make them wonder. Then you got to see something very special…” [1]
The entertainment industry functions in that manner, distracting us from the world by providing a short burst of escapism. The industry is pervasive, spanning many aspects of our lives. Film/Televisions, Cruises, Concerts, and Sporting Events are just a few examples of entertainment that people regularly consume. O’Donnell succinctly mentions how entertainment helps us forget our problems for a moment, yet it often comes at an immense environmental cost [2].
While I will be going more in-depth in future posts, here is an appetizer of just how pollutive the entertainment industry is.
Fig 1. Pollution generated from music festivals in the UK [3]
Figure 1 details how a study from 2015 by Powerful Thinking of 279 UK summer music festivals uncovered the amount of pollution generated by them including
- Nearly 20,000 tonnes of on-site CO2 emissions annually
- 23,500 tonnes of waste annually (of which less than a third is recycled)
- 80% of a festival’s total emissions come from travel alone
- 5 million liters of fuel consumed annually
Research has shown that festivals, while short-lived, generate huge amounts of single-use packaging, becoming a dominant waste stream [4]. If not disposed of properly, single-use plastics can have huge environmental impacts like the uptake of micro- and nano-plastics by marine biota throughout the food chain, and chemical additives and contaminants present pose risks to marine ecosystems and food availability [5]. This is just one aspect of pollution that comes from music festivals, which in itself is just one small subset of the entertainment industry.
With each coming blog post, I hope to provide a brief but detailed look at how a niche of entertainment has a huge pollutive toll on our environment to raise awareness of the true cost of entertainment that so often slips our minds. With this information, we can effect change both personally and industry-wide to make it a better one divorced from ‘polluting for fun’.
– Lucian T. K.
References
[1] Nolan, C., & Nolan, J. (2006). The prestige (2006). Script Slug. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://www.scriptslug.com/script/the-prestige-2006
[2] O’Donnell, D. (2019, December 21). The environmental cost of entertainment. CATALYST. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://catalyst.cm/stories-new/2019/12/21/the-environmental-cost-of-entertainment
[3] Powerful Thinking. (2018, April 27). The show must go on report. Powerful Thinking. Retrieved January 26, 2023, from https://www.powerful-thinking.org.uk/resources/the-show-must-go-on-report/
[4] Šuškevičė, V., & Kruopienė, J. (2020). Improvement of packaging circularity through the application of Reusable Beverage Cup reuse models at outdoor festivals and events. Sustainability, 13(1), 247. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010247
[5] Gallo, F., Fossi, C., Weber, R., Santillo, D., Sousa, J., Ingram, I., Nadal, A., & Romano, D. (2018). Marine Litter Plastics and microplastics and their toxic chemicals components: The need for urgent preventive measures. Environmental Sciences Europe, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-018-0139-z