What sustainable events actually cost: Lessons from the front lines

By Aashi Agarwal

Ask most people what makes an event sustainable and they will probably say a paper straw, a compost bin and a reusable cup. None of these are wrong, but they’re not nearly enough. Not by a long shot. During my time at Greenlit, a sustainability consultancy working with live events, we learned that the decisions with the biggest climate impact are usually made long before the audience walks through the gate. They are buried in power contracts, procurement specifications, transport plans, catering agreements and waste-management systems. These are not simply environmental decisions. Increasingly, they are business decisions.

From the margins to the centre

For years, sustainability sat awkwardly on the margins of the events industry’s P&L. Live events operate on tight margins, unpredictable demand and non-negotiable deadlines. Anything that looked like an additional cost or operational risk was easy to push down the priority list. Sustainability was therefore often treated as a line item rather than a design principle: something to add if the budget allowed. Now, slowly but surely, that logic is changing.

The events industry is facing greater pressure from regulators, investors, sponsors and audiences to demonstrate measurable environmental action. In India, the growing live entertainment market is increasingly attracting younger, urban audiences whose expectations around brands and experiences are changing too.

The decisions that matter happen upstream

Consider energy. The default power source for many Indian live events remains the diesel generator. It is familiar, reliable and relatively easy to deploy. But generators are often sized for peak-load requirements and can spend much of their operating time running below their most efficient load range.

Battery energy storage systems offer a different model. They can store electricity during lower-demand periods and discharge it when demand peaks, reducing the need to keep generators running continuously.

The technology is already being tested at major events internationally. At Glastonbury, hybrid power systems combining batteries with renewable generation have reduced diesel consumption. Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour went further, combining battery storage, solar charging and other technologies. The tour reported a substantial reduction in emissions compared with the band’s previous tour. At Greenlit, we piloted this for the first time at a large-scale live event at the John Mayer concert in Mumbai, setting a new industry standard in India. The sustainability intervention here is also an energy-management intervention.

The same logic applies to mobility. An event can buy compostable cutlery and still have a huge carbon footprint if thousands of people fly or drive long distances to attend it.

Massive Attack’s Act 1.5 festival in Bristol provides a useful example. Designed with researchers at the University of Manchester’s Tyndall Centre, the event focused on the major sources of emissions rather than the most visible ones. It used battery power instead of diesel generators, served plant-based food and prioritised ticket sales for people living locally. The result was dramatic reductions in power, catering and transport emissions. But one finding was even more revealing: a tiny proportion of the audience who flew to the event accounted for a disproportionately large share of audience travel emissions.

This is an uncomfortable fact for the events industry: If audiences continue to travel long distances, particularly by air, there is a limit to what can be achieved through on-site interventions alone. And yet, often the success of an event depends on just that. How events solve for this will be interesting to watch.

Waste is a design problem

Waste is another area where events have traditionally focused on what the audience can see. Bins are put out. Signage tells people what goes where. Cups are changed. Compostable cutlery replaces plastic. But by the time an attendee is standing in front of a waste bin, most of the waste problem has already been designed. Because it began with procurement.

What packaging did the caterer buy? How much food was ordered? Were reusable systems possible? Were suppliers required to take packaging back? Was a recovery partner contracted before the event or called after the waste had accumulated?

Following Coldplay’s Mumbai concerts in 2025, civic authorities reported collecting around 82 tonnes of mixed waste across multiple show days. Public discussion predictably focused on audience behaviour. But blaming the audience misses the more important question: how was the waste system designed?

Sometimes the “green” material isn’t the greenest choice

This is one of the findings that tends to surprise people the most. Plastic is frequently treated as the obvious villain in event sustainability. But material choice cannot be separated from what happens to that material after use. A material with a lower theoretical environmental impact can perform worse in practice if the local infrastructure cannot collect, sort, process or recover it.

In parts of India, plastic recovery systems are more established than those for compostable or bio-based alternatives. That does not make plastic inherently sustainable. It means that replacing one material with another without examining the entire lifecycle can turn sustainability into a branding exercise. Purchasers have to ask not only if the material itself is green, but what happens to it after the event. This shift from materials to systems is critical.

Better sustainability planning can reduce operating costs too

We’ve already seen how battery storage reduces generator runtime, cutting diesel consumption and emissions, as well as expenditure. Similarly, moving equipment or people more efficiently can reduce both emissions and logistics costs. Better waste segregation can reduce the amount of material sent for disposal while increasing recovery. Better procurement can reduce the amount of material purchased in the first place.

This is where the claim that sustainable events simply cost more is becoming harder to sustain. Some interventions certainly require upfront investment. But others reduce operating costs, reduce exposure to volatile fuel prices, improve resource efficiency or reduce the risk associated with increasingly stringent environmental requirements.

The business case is therefore not “sustainability is free”, but that sustainability has been poorly accounted for when its benefits are excluded from the calculation.

The biggest emissions source may not be where you think

Organisers fall into an easy trap: measuring what is easiest to measure rather than what matters the most. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is an instructive example. The tournament benefits from the use of existing stadiums across the US, Mexico and Canada, avoiding much of the construction footprint associated with Qatar 2022. That is a structural improvement.

But independent estimates suggest that spectator travel accounted for the overwhelming majority of the tournament’s emissions. The 48-team competition was spread across 16 cities in three countries, creating enormous distances for spectators and teams to cover.

That creates an awkward question: what happens when an event does a very good job of reducing the emissions it can easily control while leaving its largest source of emissions largely untouched?

Wimbledon offers a useful contrast. The All England Lawn Tennis Club has been measuring its footprint since 2009. Its own analysis indicates that travel is the dominant source of emissions. Rather than pretending that the problem does not exist, its sustainability strategy has increasingly focused on reducing operational emissions while addressing travel and other major sources over time. Neither event is perfect. But the point is that credible sustainability begins with knowing where the footprint actually is.

The danger of greenwashing

This also explains why sustainability claims are becoming much harder to make casually. The events industry has become very good at producing the aesthetics of sustainability. A green activation, a recycled product, a tree-planting campaign or a “carbon neutral” badge can all make an event look responsible.

But the test should always be: what changed upstream?

Was the power system redesigned or was a solar panel installed for a photo opportunity? Was the catering contract changed to reduce food waste or was the menu simply labelled “plant-forward”? Were suppliers required to meet sustainability standards or was a sustainability logo added to the event website? Is there a documented system behind the claim, and can the numbers be independently verified?

ISO 20121, the international standard for event sustainability management systems, exists precisely because sustainability cannot be reduced to a handful of visible interventions. The standard focuses on a documented management system covering areas such as procurement, supply chains, resource use, waste and reporting.

This is important because greenwashing is increasingly moving from a reputational problem to a legal one. FIFA’s experience with its claim that the Qatar World Cup was “carbon neutral” illustrates the risk. Swiss regulators found the claim misleading, while campaigners challenged the underlying emissions calculations and offsets. The broader lesson for event organisers is straightforward: a sustainability claim without a defensible methodology can become a liability.

What should organisers actually do?

The good news is that organisers do not need to become climate scientists to begin. But they need to start asking better questions.

First, measure the major sources of emissions before choosing interventions. Energy, travel, accommodation, freight, food and materials will not have the same significance for every event.

Second, redesign procurement. Sustainability needs to enter contracts with caterers, suppliers, venues, transport providers and waste partners rather than appearing only in the communications plan.

Third, address energy at the system level. Assess actual demand, explore batteries and renewable electricity where feasible and avoid treating diesel generation as the inevitable default.

Fourth, treat mobility as a central climate issue rather than an attendee convenience issue. Public transport, shared mobility, local ticketing strategies and better scheduling can matter far more than swapping disposable materials.

Fifth, design waste systems before the event begins. Measure what comes in, what is recovered and what ultimately goes to landfill or incineration.

Sixth, be honest about what remains. Offsets should not be a substitute for reduction, and “net zero” should not become a way of avoiding the difficult work of reducing emissions at source.

Finally, publish the numbers.

Not every event will be able to eliminate its footprint. Not every venue will have access to renewable electricity. Not every audience will arrive by train.

But an organiser who can say where the emissions came from, what was reduced, what could not be reduced and why is already operating at a different level from one that simply announces that an event was “green”.

The piece is published in arrangement with Climate Action Live