The Barbican Centre has a dedicated Environmental Sustainability Working Party who, with the Management Team, are working to the most up-to-date vision of energy and resource use, in order to minimise our impact on the environment and to promote sustainability and environmental awareness.
Our award winning waste management initiatives have earned us the prestigious Chairman's Cup award at the Clean City Awards scheme this year.
Previous Clean City Awards 2010: Premier (Chairman's Cup) 2009: Platinum 2008: Gold 2007: Gold 2006: Platinum 2005: Platinum
We take our recycling seriously! With over 800 staff and 1.4 million visitors using the Centre in a year, there is a lot of waste to manage!
Through extending our recycling to the Public with recycling points in our public spaces, as well as introducing a new food recycling programme across our entire catering operation, we have been able to diminish the amount of waste we are sending to landfill.
Did you know? We not only recycle glass paper and plastics, but also food waste. Not one scrap of food is wasted. We are the first City business to trial and implement a 100% food recycling programme where all our food waste gets collected in the catering 1100.ltr bins and sent to be treated at a special plant where it is turned into fertiliser and returned to the soil.
Other things we recycle Packaging, unused programmes, stationery, IT equipment, toner cartridges, stamps, mobiles, batteries, florescent tubes and even the lost property that hasn’t been claimed after 3 months is sent to various charities.
Behind the scenes energy savings New lighting installations have motion sensors and will switch off when no presence is detected; this is estimated to halve energy/ carbon usage.
We have calculated that the repainting project on the roof area of our Art Gallery has resulted in solar protective qualities that will equate to a saving of around 91 tonnes in reduced carbon emissions over the next three years.
Green parking: Did you know the Barbican offers a “Green Flexi Card” for a reduced parking rate for 'green' vehicles?
To qualify for a Green Flexi Card you must drive a vehicle with a CO2 emission rating of 100g/km or less. Find out more
BS8901Compliance The Barbican's Business events team is committed to developing events within a framework compliant with the BS8901 sustainable events management system.
We recognize that our business activities has an effect on the environment and are working to reduce this impact through our BS8901 management system. We will achieve this by measuring and reducing the amount of waste generated by events, reducing and minimizing the carbon emitted and the energy consumed by events and to minimise the effects of business transport.
Waste Management - Benchmarking information As a part of our BS8901 commitment to measure the waste generated by events, we have undertaken measurements at a number of different types of events to provide benchmark figures of waste produced in the different waste streams including recycled waste. Our recyclable waste streams include our food waste which is recycled and turned onto compost at an external facility before being returned to the land as a soil improver.
Barbican’s DEC Rating Our property has a current energy efficiency rating of 73, an improvement of 9 points on our 2010 rating due to our continued efforts to make our building more energy efficient thus reducing our carbon footprint. Investing in energy efficient technology and an increased behavioral change has played a huge part in this success. With other energy efficiency projects planned for 2012, we hope to further reduce both our energy consumption and carbon footprint. Download a PDF version of the Barbican DEC certificate.
Annual Events The Barbican is proud to participate annually in Earth Hour and Climate Week.
We strive to engage all our customers to get involved so let us know what you think we could be doing.
Download our Sustainability Information as a PDF
