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On the 23 rd of July 2025, the Society of British Theatre Designers launched \u2018A Guide to Sustainable Materials for Theatre Design\u2019. This is a new visual guide that reviews materials qualitatively for their environmental credentials and potential usages on stage.<\/p>\n
The guide covers a range of materials including those that are already used in theatre, such as engineered woods, and others that have not been used or are only beginning to be used on stage, such as bio-plastics and bacterial dyes. The materials featured have been researched and written about by a group of designers, puppeteers, and costume makers within the SBTD\u2019s sustainability working group. Each page covers a different material and draws on the designers\u2019 experiences and expertise, from procurement strategies and scientific experimentation, to DIY recipes and sample testing. The discussion of the materials covers the disadvantages as well as the advantages in order to be transparent about any aspect that was unclear or unsustainable, and to avoid greenwashing. Importantly, the assessment of environmental sustainability has been included in a table titled \u2018Material Matters\u2019 which features at the top of each page. This table summarises information about properties, uses, toxicity, recyclability, embodied energy, and biodegradability. This assessment framework can be a powerful tool in making design decisions and can be applied to other products beyond those covered in the guide.<\/p>\n
Though the guide is directed towards designers, it will be of interest to a range of stakeholders in the theatre making process, as it covers aesthetic, cultural, historical and pragmatic information in bite-size sections that can be read as a whole or separately.<\/p>\n
The philosophy of the guide is to reframe sustainability as a creative and artistic possibility to try new materials and material processes on stage.<\/p>\n