A Year of Green Initiatives

At Capital Theatres we are committed to minimising the environmental impact of our activities, and to exceeding basic legal requirements where possible. We continually report on how our environmental policies, focused on three areas (carbon reduction, influencing change and embedding environmental awareness), are being met, surpassed and changed.

To celebrate World Environment Day, we wanted to give you a taste of some of the projects our Green Team have worked on during the past year and how you can get involved.

Grab your Keep Cup

How many times have you left the house in need of a coffee and bought one in a take-away cup? In the UK we use 7 million disposable coffee cups every day – that’s 2.5 billion every year.

To reduce our plastic waste, our customers can now purchase a reusable cup our Festival Theatre Café. Our Capital Theatre reusable cups are made from eco-friendly, biodegradable bamboo fibre and you can choose from a selection of different sizes and patterns. Prices range from £10.50 to £13 but will last you for many years to come.

Bringing sunshine to Leith

To mark the arrival of the musical Sunshine on Leith to the King’s Theatre, we wanted to give a little something back to Leith. We gathered a team of Capital Theatres staff and their families, ranging from 3-year olds to 60-year olds, and volunteered with the help of the Water of Leith Conservation Trust to clean an area along the river bank.

There may not have been much sunshine that day in Edinburgh, but we certainly felt the warmth of the community spirit.

The Final Straw

Did you know straws can take up to 200 years to biodegrade? This year we started to phase out the plastic straws across our cafe and bars and offered an environmentally friendly alternative: paper straws!

Long Live the Queen Bee

We welcomed a colony of nearly 50,000 honey bees to the Festival Theatre roof in Spring 2017. Doing our bit to help address the declining bee population, we worked with urban beekeepers Plan Bee to install our first beehive, and will soon be installing our second as our bees are thriving.

You can adopt and name a Honey Bee!

Our very own -mini - green oasis

Our venues are conveniently located in the heart of Edinburgh; unfortunately, that means space is very limited. Striving to create as many green spaces as possible around our venues, we took the opportunity to create a flower oasis at the Festival Theatre.

The flower bed, a small area of foliage in the Festival Theatre courtyard, is colourful, bright and the perfect feeding spot for our bees! Graham Simpson (who you may have seen as part of our Customer Services team welcoming our audiences front of house) looks after the garden and keeps it blooming lovely all year round.