Green nightlife - reducing the cost of having a good time

Everyone needs to let their hair down sometimes. But no matter how green we are in other aspects of our life it's easy to forget that a night out has its own costs in terms of the environment. Radiohead recently had the carbon and ecological footprints of two of their tours assessed with some interesting results. One tour, an amphitheatre tour, generated an estimated 9000 tonnes of CO2, while a tour of smaller theatres and venues generated almost 2300 tonnes. Even more interestingly well over 80% of this (over 90% in fact for the amphitheatre tour) was a result of fan travel and consumption.

Now, obviously we don't want to have to give up live music for the sake of the environment, but there's some obvious things we can do to improve things. In particular where transport is concerned - if more gig-goers car shared or even better used buses and trains it would make a major dent in these figures.

It's not just live music that has environmental impacts though - even a night out on the town will mean more carbon being produced. The lights and sound systems at an average nightclub mean that they produce around the same annual carbon emissions as twenty houses. But steps are being taken to improve things, with a number of eco-friendly clubs existing around the world including Surya in London, which opened last year. The club sells organic drinks, uses a system that recycles its waste water and to top it off generates electricity from the vibrations of its dance floor! It also offers discounts to clubbers arriving on foot or bike rather than by car. The organisation behind the club, Club4Climate are hoping that it will encourage other nightspots to follow in its footprints.

And don't forget even a night in can be made greener, with organic drinks and even carbon neutral beer meaning we can enjoy ourselves with minimal impacts.