Brighton and Hove thrives on gatherings of all kinds – from cultural festivals and athletic competitions to neighborhood festivals. These occasions strengthen community bonds, stimulate the local economy, create employment opportunities, highlight the city’s finest qualities, and draw considerable visitor numbers annually. They represent an essential element of what makes this urban area so lively, inventive, and hospitable.
Our calendar of happenings offers options for diverse interests. April featured the Brighton Marathon, while May brings the Brighton Festival, now celebrating its 60th anniversary. These periods transform the city – greeting guests, assisting local enterprises, and demonstrating why residents cherish calling this place home.
Yet these large-scale occasions demand careful management. Significant gatherings naturally generate refuse, consume energy, and strain public areas. While robust recycling and waste management standards have existed for events, recent collaborative efforts with organizers – alongside our partners at Leave No Trace Brighton – have advanced sustainability measures substantially.
This initiative emphasizes reusing items, refilling containers, and composting organic matter. Event planners must now agree to an enhanced Sustainable Event Commitment, outlining concrete steps to minimize environmental effects. This encompasses promoting reusable drinkware and food containers, adding fees for disposable products, and installing complimentary water refill stations to decrease plastic consumption.
The Brighton Marathon exemplifies this progress. Following extensive collaboration with organizers, the 2026 event will launch a “Team Green” program, backed by a sustainability partner supplying runners with wearable hydration vests. The extensive single-use plastic bottles from earlier years have been substituted with refill stations and compostable cups, markedly cutting plastic waste. This establishes a benchmark for comparable events nationally and illustrates achievable outcomes.
For outdoor gatherings requiring electricity, diesel generators are being phased out wherever feasible. Organizers receive guidance to utilize permanent electrical connections, and installation has commenced at primary event sites to make this transition both manageable and cost-effective.
These endeavors complement broader citywide initiatives to increase recycling rates and minimize waste generation. Significant progress has occurred over recent years, though occasional social media remarks suggest everything gets sent to incineration – a claim that proves unfounded.
Research indicates that recycling participation rises when residents understand material destinations and maintain confidence in the system.
With this context, let’s examine the fundamentals. Council resources absolutely do not fund elaborate collections of separate waste streams only to combine them subsequently and dispatch to incineration – that approach would make no logical sense.
Space limitations prevent detailed explanation of every collected material, though I’ll address the two most recent additions: plastics and food waste.
Collected food waste travels to a composting facility in East Sussex located between Uckfield and Hailsham, where it undergoes processing for several weeks before becoming compost distributed throughout the region, returning to Brighton and Hove. This demonstrates circular economy principles while generating considerably lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to incineration – the facility, officially termed the Energy Recovery Facility, generates electricity sufficient for 25,000 households.
The other recently introduced waste stream comprises plastic pots, tubs, and trays, with collections beginning in June 2025. These materials undergo separation from mixed recycling at the Materials Recovery Facility in Hollingdean, where they’re compressed into bales and forwarded to a plastics sorting operation in Essex. There, they’re further segregated into specific polymer categories for recycling.
A frequent inquiry concerns domestic processing of these plastics. While complete domestic handling would be ideal, material markets operate globally. Certain polymer varieties require specialized processes unavailable in every nation.
Positive news: approximately 80 percent of these plastics receive recycling treatment within the UK. Materials unable to undergo processing domestically are recycled in European nations featuring rigorous regulatory frameworks – indeed, the EU maintains stronger environmental regulations than exist in Britain following Brexit.
Additional material streams will follow.