These are very much in progress: one is the meal items or equipment and the other is the event process or development. kg/co2 will be added for all items thanks to Jamie at Groundwork.
The 'why are we doing this' text is enormous and will probably need to be handwritten. It will cover most of the board so any ideas as to how to make it lively are welcome. Maybe a border around it, maybe occasional images referring to particular words. Here is the text (long innit and yes there are typos, it will be editted):
THE STORY OF THE MEAL, ACT XXXI, PLYMOUTH
What are we doing?
These blackboards show the story of The Meal and attempt to work out the environmental impacts of this event and its organisation in terms of carbon emissions. We have been working with illustration students from Plymouth ¬College of Art & Design and the business management team at Groundwork South West to realise this.
For this event this is has mostly only been possible by analysing transportation of goods and services to get here. In some areas where the data has been available to us we have been able to go deeper. However this is very rarely the case as most companies and organisations of whatever scale are still not thinking in these terms or providing this information. We are also showing some comparisons between some of the elements we have cosnciously chosen for The Meal and readily available alternatives.
Making the connections between production, manufacture, transport, processing, consumption and waste to helps us consider how these loops can be made more efficient. Even by asking these questions to various individuals and companies we have prompted interesting discussion and new research. Nothing that is produced or used comes for free or disappears into thin air. Planet earth, which includes us, is an evolving interlinked system.
We have tried to source from across the South West where possible given the time constraints in organising this event. (Groundwork operates across the South West region). Mistakes and interesting discoveries have been made along the way.
Why we are doing this and the calculations we have used
To transfer to a more environmentally and socially responsible society and to reduce our carbon footprints we need to think through the full impacts of all our actions. One way of dissecting this is to look at quantifying how much carbon we are using as part of our everyday lives for moving things and people around. We realise that measuring Carbon Dioxide emitted from transportation is only one way of looking at our environmental impact. All CO2 calculations were derived from data collected by the parties involved in that particular aspect of the event ie the forager. The data is ensured to be as accurate as reasonably possible and then calculated using the latest government approved DEFRA CO2 conversion factors. This gives a quantifiable measure of CO2 generated by an action or process.
We hope by making these hidden costs transparent and visually interesting to explore we can provide food for thought in terms of our resource use and consumer decisions.
Jo Salter & Anne-Marie Culhane, artist/co-ordinators
With many thanks to : Jamie Mclaren-Smith, Katie Hughes and Ray White at Groundwork, Mel Brown, illustration tutor , James Mankievicz, illustrator Plymouth College of Art & Design.
