Pastures greener: environmentalism in students

Folk Musician Nick Mulvey teamed up with a Cornish brewery this autumn to release his latest single on vinyl made from plastic waste found along the Cornish shoreline. Proceeds from the single are going to Surfers Against Sewage. I liked this story and shared it with my music tech students. I was pleased to have a number of them ask what they could do to get involved with making the music industry a more environmentally renewable place.

Firstly, a bit of background. The music industry, together with the rest of the creative arts sector, makes up about 10 percent of GDP. We also make up about seven percent of the net carbon and greenhouse gas emissions for the UK. So can we sit back and feel smug that we're under target for our size? Well, not quite. That's still a lot of carbon.

Most of the music industry's footprint comes from touring and festivals. We all saw the pictures of Glastonbury before the plastic ban. But it's too easy to wring our hands, write an angry email or go on a protest march, thinking that we've made a difference. We haven't, and I have a bunch of passionate students at my door who are not buying my ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ email as affirmative action.

Paperless

This is the obvious and probably most painful change to make in a school music department. As a late convert to teaching, I came to the profession paperless because the tech/media sector I came from had dispensed with paper years ago. And honestly, I'm the type of teacher who would lose the pile of essays, spill coffee on them, or both! So email submissions work nicely for me. For written papers, I despair of colleagues’ classrooms, littered with carefully marked mock exam papers, left strewn across the floor like a post-apocalyptic nightmare. My solution has always been to scan papers and email them to the students, and increasingly I find students word-processing their exams. Hopefully with a bit of pressure on exam boards, we might even reconsider the forests of paper which get posted back and forth every June.

The most usual reaction to the notion of a paperless music department is: ‘But what about the orchestra?’ Leaving aside the question of how many of us have anything approaching an orchestra in our departments these days, I don't want to demonise paper completely. Where orchestral and choral sets have already been printed, they are an absolute joy, and I still have volumes of old books on my shelves. I'm not going to spend hours printing parts from internet databases when a few phone calls will locate the same set in a local library.

Offsetting

I'm taking my students on a recording studio trip in the new year. It would be nice to get them there and back with the smallest carbon footprint possible, and so we're jumping on the train. That hardly absolves the 12 of us from making a combined 2000-mile trip, but it does seem to be the least impactful way of getting back and forth.

And so we dive into the wonderful world of offsetting. I should say that offsetting itself is less than ideal. The damage has been done – the apology is frequently only a formality. But part of sustainability and renewability is finding ways to live life without impacting the environment, and we're not going to do that by stopping living our own lives.

Finding a reliable carbon footprint calculator is a minefield. Most of the online sites gave me wildly different readings for the same journey. I think, short of aggregating the results from each one, that the bottom line is to pick a figure. The science of offsetting isn't exact, and neither are the quantities.

We have decided as a group to plant two apple trees as our offset. I was keen that the students had some practical involvement with this, rather than just handing over some money to a nebulous company. Hopefully, more than just gardening, this will embed the idea of practical offsetting for at least 11 of the next generation.

Delivery

As is so often the case, the market has driven change more effectively than protests. Digital downloads and streaming of music have cut 80 percent of the record industry's ‘material intensity’ compared to compact disc-related physical distribution. Again, I would like exam boards to jump on board with this. I still submit a lot of my GCSE, A level and BTEC coursework in solid media (CDs, memory sticks). I get that the files are large – high quality music files are – and the challenge of building systems that allow for reliable mass digital upload is great (and let's face it, teachers, we're all going to upload on the same day, right before the deadline!).

The issue here is not necessarily the plastic waste so much as modelling for my students that this is acceptable. If they see me burning off 20 DVDs each year and posting them, the takeaway message is that this behaviour is acceptable.

One of the easiest things to forget is that as performers, we have a platform – and young people even more so. When they write songs and sing their message, that's more powerful than anything I could put across, and I love them for it. I'm fortunate to have a bunch of students who care deeply about environmental issues. At my previous school, my attempts to engage students with environmental topics were met at first with blank faces and derision.

My role is to provide a platform for the kids to express themselves, make sure people are there to listen, and suggest ideas for how we as a department can start to move towards a negative carbon footprint. But the kids have far better ideas than I do. Frequently, my job is more about listening than talking. And that's the way it should be.

How to recycle CDs?

Reuse: CDs are a brilliant way to listen to music in high quality. Pass them on to students, other departments, or take them to the local charity shop or library. Failing that, try Freecycle, Freegle or local recycling groups. Music Magpie, Zapper and Ziffit will even pay for them!

Repurpose: CDs make great hanging garden ornaments and help scare the birds off of newly planted beds! They also make trendy coasters, placemats and, with the addition of some heat and a little PVC glue, plates and bowls. Indulge your inner hipster

Recycle: OK, CDs are a pain to recycle. They're a complex mix of polycarbonate plastics and aluminium foil, which most household recycling centres won't touch, and they won't biodegrade for millennia. But new technologies are being introduced all the time. It's worth searching out a local recycling centre which will take CDs – they do exist.