At Spike Island Artspace, we’ve spent the last 12 months laying the groundwork for our first action year, cooking up new and inventive ways to reduce our carbon footprint. What started with keeping an eye on our gas and electric snowballed into a building-wide campaign to "Spike the Carbon" and get every studio and office switching off!

Spike Island Artspace is a pretty eclectic place.  Predominantly a gallery and cafe, it also contains studios and offices that house over 70 artists and over 50 creative businesses, as well as accommodating students from the University of the West of England. It's a pretty diverse space, and we were worried at first that this might make our carbon-cutting quest a tad troublesome. We’re happy to say that we couldn't have been more wrong!

We kicked off our efforts by sending out an energy awareness questionnaire to get an idea of the level of interest in greening the art space. We were overwhelmed with the response – 64% of the building had a ‘very positive’ attitude towards energy saving. Our campaign to lower Spike Island’s carbon footprint, 'Spike the Carbon', was born!

64% of the building had a 'very positive' attitude towards energy saving

Taking action

We’ve started an energy awareness campaign within the building, encouraging people to turn off electronic equipment and lighting.  It's no only art that graces our walls, behind the scenes there are stickers reminding people to switch off. We’ve also set up a special 'Spike the Carbon' blackboard  and mailing system to keep everyone in the loop. And we’ve had some really great results already! The staff are working really hard to be carbon friendly; lights and all electronic equipment are switched off at night and put on standby when left for long periods like lunch breaks. We’re also making big savings from printing; changing our default printer settings to black and white and double-sided means that we save electricity, and as a bonus, cash from paper and ink!

Another way that we realised we could make huge savings was from our heating. The building is draughty, with large open spaces and high ceilings, and it takes a lot of energy to heat the art space. In order to recoup these losses we’ve been carrying out a lot of servicing and repairs to our boiler and heating system in order to increase its efficiency. We’ve also installed double glazing in the building and a large, heavy set of doors between the studio and unheated areas of the building to prevent heat loss.

We’ve also tried to reduce our transport emissions. We’ve signed up to Cycle Scheme, an initiative helping to provide tax-free bikes for commuters. We can now buy employees bikes and they can pay us back through their salaries – a great project which we’re hoping should have a big effect on our vehicle emissions!

Future Savings

Now that we’ve begun our first 10:10 action year we’re getting really excited about the savings we’ll make over the next 12 months. We think that anything above a 3% reduction is worth celebrating... but we want to aim high! We’re aiming to continue to build on the successes of last year and cut down the cost of our energy bills at the same time.

Anything above a 3% reduction is worth celebrating... but we want to aim high!

We have a lot of new projects in the pipeline too. Our main focus will be on lighting – we’re in the process of installing lighting sensors so that we can crack down even further on waste. Another main area of focus will be greening the art space’s cafe, starting with making sure all the machinery is always turned off when not in use. Above all we believe that increasing energy awareness throughout everyone in the building will help us to drive down energy use over the next year. We’re in the process of adding 'Spike the Carbon' into our general induction procedure for any new artists or tenants that move into the building, as well as new staff and volunteers.

In the future we hope to continue working with the West of England Carbon Challenge, through which we've met other like-minded organisations all working towards the same goal. We want to carry on making links with other organisations within Bristol to work together in our carbon reduction effort.  Most of all though, we’re excited about the energy savings that we'll be making over the next 12 months!