The Design Museum's latest exhibition Waste Age has a carbon footprint of 10 tonnes, equal to what the average UK person emits in a year, according to a sustainability assessment by environmental collective URGE.
The audit was commissioned by the museum for its latest show, which opened on Saturday ahead of the COP26 climate conference and posits that eliminating waste is the single biggest thing the design industry can do to protect the environment.
Applying the same philosophy to the exhibition itself, the assessment aims to reveal the environmental footprint of a temporary event like this and how it can be reduced.
"We know that while exhibitions have tremendous cultural value, they can be very wasteful," the Design Museum's chief curator Justin McGuirk told Dezeen. "Especially if you're building walls out of plasterboard and plinths out of MDF, which just get chucked in a skip afterwards." Waste Age incorporated low-impact construction materials including adobe (top image) and timber (above)
Environmental audits chronicling these impacts are unprecedented in the museum sector, according to the report's co-author Sophie Thomas, who previously conducted a similar sustainability assessment for the Dezeen Day conference.
"It may not seem like a big step for a museum to crunch the carbon data like this but as a designer who has worked both in exhibition design and in sustainability for decades, I can say this amount of scrutiny on the detail really i...