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Nightlife has a reputation for encouraging wasteful behavior, but Imogen Malpas believes venues can inspire people to change their habits. She founded London-based Club Sol, a collective that hosts events and club nights, to do just that.
Every festival season, it’s as inevitable as the hangover: images of fields strewn with crushed plastic cups, abandoned tents, and litter left behind by festival-goers.
Waste, alongside the environmental impact of artist and attendee travel, equipment transport, heating, lighting, food, and water, has long presented a sustainability problem for the festival and nightlife sector. According to a 2024 report by U.S.-based NGO Seaside Sustainability, the average music festival produces 500 tons of carbon emissions over three days. That’s equivalent to driving a standard gasoline-powered car 1.2 million miles.
Given this, it would be fair to assume that partying and protecting the planet don’t go hand-in-hand. Yet over the last few years, a subtle but visible change has taken place, with post-festival fields slowly looking cleaner than ever before. From Glastonbury tote bags emblazoned with slogans like “I took the train,” to clubs powered by attendees’ body heat and the slow phasing out of single-use plastic cups, festivals and clubs are becoming climate-conscious — and transforming party culture in turn.
For some, marrying the hedonism of festivals and club events with the often-depressing reality of the climate crisis seems oxymoronic. Yet it was exactly the downbeat tone of climate communications that first inspired London-based Imogen Malpas to found Club Sol, a collective dedicated to hosting events, including club nights, with sustainability at their core.
Freelancing for a newspaper in 2023, Malpas found herself writing dozens of articles about climate and ecological collapse. She increasingly felt that the stories were “difficult to engage with and alienating for a lot of people.” Her fear was leaving the audience “feeling there was nothing tangible they could do.”
Reflecting on how “for me, the club is such a space for community, and could be organized to help a positive energy proliferate,” Malpas established Club Sol, her bid to inspire people and bring them together, rather than scaring or alienating them.
With a “Save the Night” grant award from Jagermeister, Club Sol’s first event was held in the summer of 2023 at Grow Hackney, a London venue Malpas chose for its commitment to ethical and sustainable business practices.
She worked with sustainable packaging makers Notpla to create edible shot glasses made partially of seaweed and treated clubbers to shots of Jagermeister in the glasses. The sound system was solar-powered, brought to the event from Amsterdam via water and rail, and the venue itself was run on green electricity. Attendees were also able to charge their phones with solar power and left the event with a “virtual party bag” full of vouchers from eco-friendly brands.
The event was a resounding success, though Malpas is quick to point out that Club Sol is far from alone in pioneering solutions to sustainable parties. She was partly inspired, in fact, by the system installed at Glasgow’s SWG3 warehouse in 2022 in which body heat generated by visitors is captured, stored, and used to heat and cool the building.
Beyond clubbing, even the world’s biggest music festivals are proving that partying sustainably can be achieved at scale. Shambala, a popular festival held in Northamptonshire, ditched all meat and fish options almost a decade ago and is powered by 100% renewable electricity. Glastonbury Festival, meanwhile, has banned all single-use plastic, transports artists with a fleet of electric vehicles, and provides incentives for those traveling sustainably, such as a cyclists-only campsite.
It’s obviously really exciting when someone who’s an established activist comes along and loves it. But if it changes the mind of one person who wouldn’t think of themselves that way, or gets them to think about the world in a different way — that’s the most exciting thing.
– Imogen Malpas, founder of Club Sol
Yet the road to sustainability isn’t always so easy, especially for grassroots venues struggling to keep the lights on.
“Retrofitting venues, for example, is pretty challenging and expensive, and rent is already high enough to make the cost of running venues astronomical, so I can understand when [sustainability] isn’t necessarily a priority for promoters and grassroots venues,” Malpas says.
This is where, Malpas adds, governments and big brands should be stepping in to offer organizers and venue owners funding and practical support. Grants like Save the Night, Malpas says, are vital for lending grassroots organizations like Club Sol the space and time to consider every minor sustainable tweak or innovation, from the lighting and sound system to packaging and even guiding attendees’ behavioral choices.
Although many blame clubbers and festival-goers for wasteful behavior, Malpas believes that it’s partly the promoter or venue’s responsibility for making sustainable choices as straightforward as possible.
“People are used to the idea of clubbing and nightlife being linked to excess, and that often translates to excess waste,” she says. “When people are drinking, they tend to be less careful about things like rubbish. That’s why the onus should be on the promoters. But if you’re struggling to even break even, I can sympathize with those who aren’t able to make those choices.”
That said, Malpas, and many others, believe that festival and club-goers’ expectations and behaviors are beginning to shift, too. After she ran out of reusable cups at her first Club Sol event, Malpas got feedback from attendees who said they were “really disappointed to see plastic cups at the event.”
Taking it as a learning experience for future events, she was nonetheless encouraged. “I do think that’s such a positive shift,” she says. “You wouldn’t have got that kind of feedback 10 years ago.”
Club Sol has, of course, had plenty of positive feedback, too. The best kind, Malpas says, comes from those who say “they didn’t feel they had to be any particular type of person, or think a certain way to attend the event.”
“It’s obviously really exciting when someone who’s an established activist comes along and loves it,” she explains. “But if it changes the mind of one person who wouldn’t think of themselves that way, or gets them to think about the world in a different way — that’s the most exciting thing.”
Quick to stress that Club Sol events don’t presume to translate into direct climate action, Malpas instead says the aim is to encourage a sense of community and connection between attendees in a way that might indirectly benefit the planet.
“I think it's extremely hard to care at all about climate or any of these kinds of wider interconnected issues when you just have no sense of community or why you’re doing it,” she says.
“It’s less about being preached at, and more about being shown there are multiple ways of caring about community, and multiple ways of loving the planet and caring about the people on it.”
