Environment
and Sustainability

Grid Iron have embedded environmental sustainability at the heart of our creative and practical activity, believing it is the responsibility of each of us, individually and collectively, to mitigate our actions to reduce our carbon footprint and to use our platforms to promote awareness/understanding of the deepening environmental crisis.

In June 2022 we committed to working towards the baseline standard of the Theatre Green Book – a new guideline for making sustainable theatre. We are aiming for 50% of production materials to have had a previous life and 65% of materials to go on to a future life.  An annual report will be made to the Board of Trustees, and we aim to progress through the intermediate to the advanced standard.

PRODUCTIONS

The adverse impact of the human race on the environment has been touched on in many of our productions over the years, probably first in 2006 with subtle inclusion in Roam, our co-production with National Theatre of Scotland, which investigated the positive and negative effects of global air travel.

Over the years, however, as the climate crisis has worsened, it has taken centre stage in a number of productions.  Our 2022 commission from Edinburgh International Festival, Muster Station: Leith, placed our audience in a situation which forced them to consider what it might feel like to have to leave everything behind to attempt to escape an imminent environmental catastrophe.

Our 2021 production Doppler asked what existence might be like if you choose to leave behind a life of consumption and consumerism to commune more completely with nature. Also, in 2001, we supported new Edinburgh art collective, And If Not Now, with the presentation of their first project when ran in the National Museum of Scotland throughout COP26. And If Not Now, When? asked if our response to the climate crisis will be to return to how life was before the global pandemic or us what we have learned to create a different, more sustainable reality.

In 2016, Crude looked at both the human and ecological costs of global oil production and in 2013, Leaving Planet Earth imagined a time when our consumption of our planet has escalated to such a degree that we toss it away to begin life anew elsewhere.

Please visit the relevant pages in PRODUCTION for more information about each show.

  Muster Station: Leith

  Doppler

What The Press Said

“If it feels like we’re living in a real-life disaster movie right now, Edinburgh’s site-specific auteurs Grid Iron are here to take the temperature in epic fashion… [and} have contemplated a worst-case scenario for the end of the world as we know it and brought it to life.”

“The audience are cast as climate refugees in an immersive show that weaves together issues of class, power and politics… it demonstrates in a visceral and unsettling way something of the forces, both political and meteorological, we are up against.”

“For those prepared to enter fully into the drama, the experience is undeniably harrowing, although not without its moments of humour… the point is well and truly made; that if we try to tackle this [climate] crisis using the same systems, attitudes and structures that have led us into it, rather than by embracing a new awareness of the interdependency of all life on earth, then our chances of surviving that big wave – or any other climate catastrophe – will be slim indeed.”

“an on-the-nose but effective allegory of climate change and the migrant crisis.”

“The story’s told in such an eminently believable way that calling it sci-fi is too dismissive.  The writers have done their research and skitter from one terrible consequence of climate change to another with barely a pause for breath.”

“a show that makes the impact of climate change feel very close to home…an extraordinary technical achievement and a chilling glimpse into what could easily be the near future.”

“a mightily complex and disturbing meditation for our time, delivered with a light-touch brilliance”

“a show that makes the impact of climate change feel very close to home…an extraordinary technical achievement and a chilling glimpse into what could easily be the near future.”

“this outdoor adaptation beautifully highlights the story’s central irony: that being at one with nature is impossible, because humans always pull focus”

“a timely study of one man’s self-isolation and the need to sometimes get back to nature”

“Grid Iron has brilliantly transposed this Norwegian tale, of a man who leaves his family to live in a tent, to the grounds of a national Trust for Scotland property… Here in the woods, the production reflects the tension between our impulse to go back to nature and our absorption into consumerist life.”

“The logic to Doppler’s decisions flow easily from his clear environmental concerns, sense of justice and his stand against capitalism.”

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OTHER ACTIVITY

Grid Iron have committed to the working principles and pathways set out in the Theatre Green Book as well as our own Environmental Policy and Action Plan and are embedding these across our practice. These include commitments to:

  • train all senior management with The Carbon Literacy Project by the end of 2023.
  • adapt and mitigate our ways of working to adjust for the Climate Emergency and work towards reducing our carbon footprint and achieving net zero by 2045.
  • set year-on-year carbon reduction targets and monitor and report on them annually working towards carbon neutrality in 2045.
  • share our experience and learn from others within the wider sector.
  • work with other Creative industries and Arts Resources Management Scotland to create a shared resource to promote sharing of resources.

  Roam

  Crude

Contact Us

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