A win for the planet at the M+H Awards

In this blog, Matt Sheard, Head of Experience and Engagement at the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums, shares an insight into the work our Museums colleagues have been doing to make our exhibitions sustainable – and why not winning an award was ultimately good news for the planet.

Congratulations to Gloucestershire Archives and Lambeth Palace, two very worthy winners of Sustainable Project of the Year at last week’s Museum + Heritage Awards. 

Although we didn’t bring home the trophy, it was fantastic to be finalists in that category alongside such incredible projects.  

But why were we there? 

Last summer we collaborated with colleagues at the St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities to create Rewrite the Future, an exhibition all about how the future is not set in stone and we can build a more positive world.  

You can read more about the aims and content of the exhibition in this blog from last June, but to summarise, we aimed to explore the ways our society could become more sustainable and to find out how much people would be willing to adapt to make it so. We sought to demonstrate that a more sustainable future is both hugely desirable and attainable, through storytelling, interesting objects, unexpected artworks, cutting-edge research, a variety of voices and a game that visitors played as they went around.

When it comes to a sustainable future being desirable, our visitors agreed with us. The game they played as they went around demonstrated that they wanted a more sustainable society, and were willing to make some significant changes in order to achieve it. The mainstream media doesn’t trumpet this, and those who make money from the roadblocks to sustainability don’t want them to, but our research via this game shows that it’s true.  

We’re still crunching the data from the research we did to see how audiences responded to the visit, but initial findings suggest that 57% of those visiting the exhibition left feeling more optimistic about the future, 64% feeling curious or inquisitive and 48% feeling empowered. Furthermore, initial results suggest that around 60% of visitors left likely to make a change to their own lifestyles as a result of visiting. This is a complicated figure to decipher, and the data needs a lot more analysis to enable us to be more certain and accurate about that finding.  

The exhibition had another element to it; temporary exhibitions can be incredibly wasteful. We create lots of stuff for an exhibition, then when the show closes we chuck it away. In general, one of our bigger temporary exhibitions creates around a skip of landfill waste. In contrast, when Rewrite the Future closed we sent a single binbag to landfill. Everything else we created was either reused or recycled. This blog from last July goes into more detail as to what we did that led to that result, but a large part of it was changing from plywood to a cardboard-like material called xanita.  

Not only did that switch in materials reduce what we put into landfill, but it also meant we saved an estimated 75% of the carbon output compared to what we normally would. 

This is not a one off for us. We’ve been using xanita in our current exhibition, War, Destruction and Reform: the Early Years of Mary Queen of Scots, and its now part of our process for appointing designers that they need to demonstrate how they’ll help us achieve the goal of having 80% of any new build be reused or recycled.  

So… not a win for us. But hopefully what we learnt from creating Rewrite the Future will be a win for our planet.  

And if you’re a museum professional wanting to learn more, please get in touch; we’d be thrilled to see other places striving to do the same. 

Thanks again to Studio Arc and Eastern Exhibition and Design for working with us on the show, and to Gloucestershire Archives, Lambeth Palace, the Natural History Museum, the Science and Industry Museum, and Bradford City of Culture for being worthy competitors.