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A woman with long brown hair, wearing a blue blouse and a watch, leans on a wooden railing inside a modern exhibition space. Behind her, exhibition panels and framed displays provide context to the museum setting.

WASTE AGE: WHAT CAN MUSEUMS DO TO REDUCE THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF EXHIBITIONS?

This November the South West Fed team were excited to welcome Elise Foster Vander Elst, Head of Exhibitions & Environmental Impact Lead at London’s Design Museum, who discussed new models for exhibition making in this unsettling era of climate change. We were delighted that almost 100 people attended the event from the South West and beyond.

The initial catalyst for the Design Museum’s sector-leading work in carbon reduction was its 2021-2 exhibition Waste Age: What Can Design Do?. Preparation and delivery of this show led to a 4-phase development of the Museum’s advocacy, standardisation, research and consultancy plan which is increasingly fundamental to their exhibition preparation.

Kicking off her hugely informative talk, Elise firstly acknowledged that, while the Waste Age exhibition mainly focused on waste reduction and recycling, burning fossil fuels for energy is the biggest driver of global climate change. Quoting Julie’s Bicycle, a non-profit organisation which works with the arts and culture sector to take action on the climate crisis, Elise also revealed that the UK museum sector accounts for more harmful carbon emissions than theatre, libraries and other cultural institutions, probably due to the needs of collections storage.

To make waste and carbon reduction central to the creation and storytelling behind Waste Age, the Design Museum opened the exhibition with a timeline of the history of plastic and the planned obsolescence which was built into many consumer goods. An e-waste installation by Ibrahim Mahama further illustrated how waste and items meant for recycling are frequently shipped to Ghana and other nations around the world instead of being processed in their countries of origin.

Elise also explained how the team behind Waste Age carried out a full assessment of the exhibition’s total carbon emissions, discovering that the main areas of carbon production were the display materials and object loan transport. Using this data, the Design Museum were cautious about which materials they used to build the exhibition. Unfired adobe bricks formed a beautiful curved partition, while panels were made from woodwool timber offcuts to reduce waste. Elise also recommended a flexible approach to loans to reduce transport impact. As a result of this pioneering practice, many of the Design Museum’s other exhibitions have followed a similar waste-reduction strategy.

Elise shared her hopes for the future, in which the Museum’s free exhibition design guide will be used throughout the world in multiple languages. The team are also working with the Gallery Climate Coalition to develop a new carbon impact tool with guidance from the UK Registrars Group. Ultimately, the Design Museum hopes to show leadership and accelerate action in the face of the climate crisis through collective understanding, voice and action.

The Design Museums’s environmental impact guide and model can be downloaded here.

Katherine Nichols