 still have people coming in. So the numbers are going up slightly. So anyway, I will get started. So hello everybody, welcome. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, depending on which time zone you are currently in. I'm Lorraine Finch. I am the chair of the Institute of Conservation and Environmental Sustainability Network. I'm really pleased that this is the inaugural collaboration between the AIC and the Institute of Conservation. And I will let Roxy and Kate from the AIC introduce themselves. So over to you both. So that's Roxy and Kate. My computer decided to make a noise. Hi everyone, I'm Roxy. I'm so happy to be joining you Lorraine and everyone else for this awesome event to coincide with COP26. I am the chair of the AIC Sustainability Committee this year. I'm a paintings conservator and I'm very interested to hear more about sustainable practices and always to promote them and to talk about them. And I'm joined by our network officer, Kate, who will introduce herself. Hi everyone, I'm Kate Puget. And I'm also very excited about this event. As Roxy said, I'm the network officer. So please reach out to me or to our AIC Sustainability Gmail if you have an interest in collaboration or just want to chat about sustainability issues in the climate crisis. And I want to thank our three panelists today and Lorraine for organizing this with us and dedicating our time to share their knowledge. And I'm really looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say today. So that's all us. So our plans for today are that we're going to have five to ten minutes with each one of the panelists explaining what they've done in their work to adapt to their practices to sustainability. I'm going to do a brief introduction to each panelist before they they do their five to ten minutes. And then we're going to open the floor to a panel discussion. So then it's over to you. We don't have to stick with this structure. It's all very nice and flexible and open. It's about you getting what you need out of this session. Like I said, this afternoon morning or evening. So without further ado, I would go to pass over to Elena, actually, to give you some brief housekeeping. Everybody, I'm Elena Gregg with AIC and FAIC. Just a few housekeeping items. Closed captioning is available today. So if you click on the CC link in your toolbar, you'll be able to access closed captioning. We're recording this session and it will be available to view later today. And finally, if you have any questions for the panelists, please enter them into the Q&A box. That's all for me. Thank you, Elena. So Roxy and Kay is going to be fielding the questions and passing them on to the panelists. So please do, as Elena said, put your questions in the Q&A. And we'll also be keeping an eye on the chat as well. And I can see everybody introducing themselves in the chat. Hi, Ellie. She's one of the ESNT. So hi to you all. So we're going to start with Ilva. And I'll give you a brief introduction to Ilva. And then Ilva will do a presentation on how she's adapting her work. So Ilva is an accredited conservator who works as an independent consultant in sustainability for art and material culture. She specializes in historic places, collections in context, and lived in heritage in the UK and Europe. She was previously head of Collections Conservation Services at the National Trust for Scotland and consultant conservator for the National Trust in London and the South East of England. And she designed and headed up the Book and Paper Conservation Studio at Dundee University. Ilva has served on many boards in the arts and cultural sector and is a founding member and trustee of the Institute of Conservation. And before that, she was chair of the Scottish Society for Conservation and Restoration and president of the European Confederation of Conservative Restores Organisations. Passionate about nurturing emerging conservation professionals, Ilva is an assessor and mentor on the ICON accreditation scheme and was an external examiner for the MA in conservation at the University of Arts London. And she currently teaches at the Conservation of Fine Art in Northumbria University. I'm sure there's a lot more that Ilva could have added to that. She said this is a very brief introduction. Ilva is Swedish born and she grew up green, tutored every summer by her grandfather who was a forester and gamekeeper and who taught her that the forest is the finest thing there is, which it truly is. So over to you, Ilva. Thank you so much, Lorraine. I'm sorry that was a bit long. But I wanted to tell you how I got to the sort of work that I'm doing today from being a book and paper conservator in my training. And you've done, you've touched on the places where I've worked. As you said, I grew up green and I worried about acid rain and everyday chemicals and nuclear power, of course, and the rubbish that was in sweets and all those things, because that was, I suppose we got that from school in Sweden. And I came over at the age of nine and my teachers called me a flower child and couldn't understand why I was always going on about pollution and so on. And when I became a conservator, I immediately brought into this very cozy bubble of the conservator and their object being somehow distant from the world that we were working in and all these environmental concerns. I mean, this is quite a long time ago now. And didn't really question that and it wasn't until a natural history conservator, Scottish one called Joe Sage in the 1990s, who actually berated us all at a conference for not being concerned about anything other than what we saw down in the microscope or in the display case and how we over specified our work and our display environments and over packaged everything while we were in the same process merely polluting our world. So that was a bit of a wake up call, but I don't think that the profession really started moving on this until maybe a decade and a half after that, when the, at least in the UK when the National Museum Directors Council did, I suppose, what had been talked about for in other fora for a while, but they agreed that we could actually widen the parameters for the acceptable environment for the display and storage of art and artefacts. And it was it was a watershed moment really. And though I was working for the National Trust then that officially had no demarcation between the conservation of the natural and the and the made world, I still found that there was a disconnect between my work, which was inside the houses and caring for collections and the exhibition spaces, and then those who cared for other parts of the historic interiors, which were still significant and some had original schemes and so on. But they would be the shop and the tea room and, you know, the lose and other public spaces that were within National Trust properties. So when I became an independent conservator, I started to look for ways of joining these two spheres of activity up. And I started to do to help my clients to do green re-think of the whole of their their collections and their lives because a lot of them actually live within, you know, a country house or stay at home or so. And so I started doing that just before the COVID lockdown. And then I wanted to show you something really disgusting, which I'll bring up a slide of next, because in 2020, I just come back from working in France and I found myself actually in the first UK lockdown living in a narrow boat, a canal boat in an urban environment in Edinburgh, which is absolutely lovely, but it was very compact. And as you probably remember, the first lockdown went on for months and months, and we were encouraged to go out and get exercise for about 20 minutes a day. And if you live on a, you know, on a canal, then you've got the towpath and that's just about it. So I would so cycle along the towpath. And if I share the screen, hopefully, can you see my screen? Now we can. Yep. I can. Now you can. Okay. Right. For some reason, I can't now reach the play button. So I'll just do it. Can you see it over the whole screen? Oh, there we go. Fantastic. Thank you. Whoever did that. So that's how you can reach me. Should you want to do that at some point? So during this lockdown, I started to bring together my passion for the environment and actually my professional practice. And I aligned myself to Greenpeace, to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to Fashion Revolution, and all those ones who were really, really putting a lot of material online and a lot of courses and so on. And I learned a new set of vocabulary, which I'm sure you will all know by now. And I wanted to just explain to you, I wanted to illustrate the concepts of anthropocentism, I can't even say anthropocentism, prism and cosmopperceptions, which I heard in a very good presentation a couple of days ago from COP26. So I was cycling along the towpath. And this is when we suddenly decided the world was very, very precious and that maybe we were very vulnerable as a human race. And that maybe the anthropocentrism was not the right outlook. And this is, you know, five minute cycle of ride from where we were moored. And it was a very beautiful place. And I used to sit there and listen to the birds and the look at the tadpoles. And then one day, when I was sitting on a jetty, I found this. And for me, this is just the visual epitome of everything that is wrong with us as humans and our lives and the public spaces that we inhabit. So if you look, this is a little jetty here. Can you see my pointer? And on the top right, there is a close up of what I saw. So in one cubic centimeter, I think we're illustrating there a lot of what we have to change. So somebody has squashed together a chewing gum, a cigarette butt and the ring pull from a can of carbonated drink or some kind or a beer or whatever. So there you have it. These are things we put in our mouths. They have no nutritional value between them and they actually cause us harm as an organism. We're the only, we're the only species that I know of that poisons its own food. And it's been left in this space that we share with all the other parts of biodiversity and its pollution and everything. So for me, that was a bit of a wake up call really. And I decided to extend my focus to sharing my private and professional passions for sustainability and for nature more widely than I was doing with my clients. So I've started to do more public teaching workshops where people can come and learn skills that are useful for their lives to understand as a conservator, I feel that I'm in a right, in a very good place to help people look beyond the surface of things and to understand more fully and more instinctively the stuff that the world has made out of. So whether that is the difference between different natural and manmade fibers in textiles and how to choose your clothing, how to look after it, what questions to ask the manufacturers, how to refuse, reuse, repurpose, recycle, upcycle, whatever. And I must say, fashion revolution, if you haven't found their website yet, is absolutely brilliant on all kinds of levels for that. And I know on the circular economy and Ellen MacArthur Foundation has just given out a or reissued an extremely good report on the circular economy, which I suppose fills in the parts that are missing from the at least the public conversations coming out of COP26 at the moment. It's only half the story and actually closing up the circle is what we need to do. So to finish off with, I think that I want to just share the successes that I've had with that sort of activity. It's very rewarding and as conservators, I think that we are in a really good position to explain what happens when you recycle materials, why it's not the answer to most things. And also to, we're good at explaining why things work in a simple way. We've got fantastic material that, you know, from our everyday work to show the ingenuity of humans through the ages and especially during times of scarcity of resources and whatever like, you know, for Britain that would have been the two world wars. But I mean, there are all kinds of challenges that the people have overcome by making fantastic use of what there is. We are in a fantastic position to debunk all the greenwashing that we're subjected to on a daily basis now that most companies understand that they, you know, they can't not have a sustainability policy or, you know, talk about ethical sourcing or whatever it is they need to eliminate. And yes, there is such a lot of rubbish being said out there and we're, I think, as a professional group, we can share our knowledge and upskill people to see through that and to make their own decisions. We can share things like skills for mending to build resilience and wellness. And our sector, somebody pointed out in another presentation a couple of days ago, you know, in a world of fake news and smoke and mirrors, our sector is still trusted and therefore we are in a good position to, I suppose, reiterate basic truths. So I would encourage everybody to make more noise really as conservators and make sure that we're part of the conversations not just within our sector but with allied sectors and those which are far away too. The artists and demigods Grayson Perry called conservation that weirdly mystical science and I'll finish off by saying that we really should allow ourselves to exploit the fact more that we are the happy marriage between art and science. So I think that's all I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jill. That was really interesting and, you know, I really agree with you about how we should be making more noise both within our institutions, within the sector and in the wide world as well. So next we have Nicola. Now Nicola is a chartered mechanical engineer with experience in aerospace, energy and education. In 2018, she was appointed to the newly created Chips Conservation Engineer post at Brunel's SS Great Britain in Bristol. And she is responsible for energy optimization of the system, conserving the world's first iron ship by creating a microclimate around the original material to prevent corrosion. So in this role, she's also working with colleagues across both the organization and across the city to develop the Trust's Climate Action Plan. So I'll pass it over to Nicola to explain more. Thank you, Lorraine. So as per the introduction you just had, I am not a conservator. I'm a mechanical engineer, although I have to say when I've been at various conservation events and conferences and things, I've been really refreshed by how many people will say, oh, I'm not a conservator either. One of the things I've really enjoyed about my kind of recent career moving to conservation is how much kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration there is. And I think that's a real strength. And I'll touch a little bit later on why I think that's so important. So yeah, I'm a mechanical engineer. I have had a fairly traditional education. I've got an engineering degree and I work for an engineering consultancy. My specialism is kind of heat and energy. So it's about kind of how air and heat move around spaces. And how that kind of lends itself to the SS Great Britain. I started off doing various calculations, heat-related calculations for energy systems. And I've also done some air-related calculations for aerospace. So I've got a good bit of experience doing that sort of stuff in real life. And then I, prior to moving to the SS Great Britain, I also took a short career break during which I worked teaching secondary school children computer coding. So it's that kind of combination of the technical experience and also the communication experience, which led me towards the job at the SS Great Britain. So I'm just going to do a quick screen share. So for anybody who hasn't visited the SS Great Britain, this is what she looks like from above. She was the world's first iron ship. She was designed by Ismbard Kingdom Brunel, who Bristol have got a bit of a soft spot for as an engineer. And basically what makes the ship so special is the fact that she was made from iron allowed her to be bigger and achieve more than any ship possibly had ever done in the past and also to last longer. So she was launched in 1843 and salvaged in 1970, having had an almost 100-year-long kind of productive, profitable working life, and then was scuttled and abandoned for a few decades before being salvaged and brought back to Bristol. I don't have a before photo. Sorry, that would have been quite a good thing to have. This angle here shows basically shows that you've got kind of a fake water line. So what we've got with the ship, her original material is degrading because it's very early wrought iron. It's also soaked with salt. But in particular, the part below the waterline is particularly soaked with salt because that's the part which would have been sat in the saltwater. The part above the waterline would have been washed by the rain, etc., so it's a bit cleaner. So this is what the ship looks like from above. And if I just move the slide on, this is what she looks like from below. And pretty much the kind of primary trick that we use to conserve the ship is to create, and you can probably just about visualize it from this picture, to create an invisible curtain of air. So you can kind of see the nozzles coming out from underneath the ship. We've got very dry air coming out of those nozzles. And the idea is that that air flows along the surface of the ship, and then it disappears into the kind of metallic snake things that you can see coming around the side of the ship. And by doing that, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the kind of bit of air that's right next to the ship to 20% relative humidity, which is very dry, especially if you live in the UK, it's very dry indeed. So if you can imagine what the curtain of air would look like over the surface of the ship, we're trying to get that air at 20% relative humidity, while also allowing people into the dry dock with it. So the part of the space where the people are is not at 20% relative humidity, because what we've tried to do is to engineer that curtain of air so that it just flows along the surface of the ship. So that solution was designed by a team of engineers of various different disciplines. So you've got mechanical engineers, you've got your fluid dynamics specialists, you've got your electronics and your control engineers, you've got your software engineers, and you've got your structural engineers and civil engineers who did the work on the dry dock. And all of those engineers being managed by a curator who kind of led the creation of this project. Once this project was finished, that was about 2005, from then until my role was created, which was 15 years later, the system was maintained by separate engineers maintaining the separate parts. But there wasn't really anybody who kind of had ownership for the system as a whole. So my job was newly created to try and take that on. So all of the individual parts were working fine, but it was how they were talking to each other and how the system as a whole was working, which was what my job was created to address. So I guess my job description is that I am responsible for conservation strategy for the ship. Day to day, that involves kind of controls, mechanics, how things talk to each other, what's going on with the air, that sort of thing. But one of the key things that the exec team had in mind when my job was created was of course sustainability. Now the mission statement for the SS Great Britain Trust is to conserve the ship in her dry dock for all time and for the benefit of it. So there's a sustainability and an inclusivity literally written into the mission statement of the trust, which I'll come back to a bit later, but that's something I like to remind people of when it comes to trying to influence people and to get action when you need it. So part of my job was to look at the sustainability of the system. As you can probably imagine, it uses quite a lot of energy. So unlike a lot of organisations in our sector, what I call our scope, well, what is called our scope one and scope two carbon footprint is quite a lot bigger than our scope three carbon footprint, which I don't think is all that common. But if museums have got big, close controlled spaces, then scope one and scope two. Do you want me to describe what I mean by scope one and scope two? So basically, scope one is the CO2 that we as an organisation directly put into the atmosphere. So in practical terms, for most organisations, that's any gas that they burn, any fossil fuels that they burn themselves. And so that's things like gas boilers, gas theatres and also company cars, basically, are pretty much the main sources of scope one. So scope two are fossil fuels that are put in the atmosphere by other people in the process of generating our electricity. So unless your electricity is 100% renewable, then that's your scope two. And scope three is basically everything else. So all of the CO2 that is put into the atmosphere for your entire supply chain and your customers while interacting with you. So scope three can be quite daunting. But again, I'm sure that this is something that we'll come back to later in the discussion. And I can share a few insights about how to kind of get your head around scope three later on. Anyway, come back to the point. So we've actually got a fairly appreciable scope one and scope two. So therefore it is worthwhile spending some time on really making sure that the system uses as little energy as it possibly can. In 2019, we declared a climate emergency. And the trust have committed to become carbon neutral by 2030. I'm not entirely sure how we're going to do that. But we're kind of learning as we go along. And we have we have actually made some big improvements already. One of the first things that I one of the first kind of big meaningful things that I did as part of this job was to upgrade the sensors and the software that controls the system, which then gives us access to a lot more information and a lot more data, which we can then start to use to kind of analyze when does it work well and not work well, what bits use the most energy. And then, you know, we can use that information to start making changes. We've also recently had a couple of made a couple of kind of hardware upgrades so made physical improvements to the kit which conditions the air. So on the theme of collaboration, we recently had a collaboration with one of our suppliers where basically we help them with their publicity, because as you can imagine, you know, we're quite a big and very visually appealing project. We help them with publicity in exchange for discount on some of that. And then we've also been applying for so another part of my job of course is to write the business cases to write the funding applications to to make the changes that we need to reduce our carbon footprint. So aside from the energy side of stuff, I'm also kind of kind of working with a group, a working group we've got from across the whole organization to help just to make sure that we're all talking to each other about climate related things and what we can do and sharing ideas and things. And I'm also currently in the process of writing or drafting at least our organization's climate action plan, which is hopefully going to capture all of this work. And it will be a living document which over the next few years will hopefully start to turn into a bit of a roadmap as to how we are actually going to become carbon neutral. I guess that my final point is I will just make one more point before I finish for now. And I guess that's that I did a little bit before is about the engineering and communication thing. A lot of what I find myself doing is translating between engineering contractors and curatorial team or directors etc. And I made a comment in there was an event earlier in the year about passive sustainable, passive climate control. And I made a comment at that event about how definitely a problem that a lot of people I've spoken to have with engineers is finding them incomprehensible, finding them very difficult to understand. And in my opinion engineers are terrible at communicating with non-engineers. And that's something, especially with things like jargon and I know jargon is going to be one of the themes that we talk about this evening. So yeah, I found myself becoming a bit of an organizational jargon buster and just generally becoming a translator between the kind of technical and the non-technical side of the organization. And yeah, I think that's I think that one of the really key things that we need to do if we're going to improve is to improve the way that we communicate because I think it's really important to be working cross-disciplinary. I think it's really important to avoid duplicating effort because this is an emergency, this is not time to be doing the same thing that somebody else did five years ago. And I think it's communication that is the key to unlocking that. Thank you, Nicola. And so that's the second time tonight that communication has been flagged as the important factor. And I completely agree with you on that. It's what we need to be doing. As you say, it's an emergency. We shouldn't be duplicating effort. We should be sharing our work with one another, which is what tonight is about. So we'll move further delay. We will move on to Lois. So Lois is representing Catherine R. Unlimited and dependent easel paintings, conservation and restoration studio based in West London, where she works as studio manager. Over the past year, Lois has directed the company's process of reviewing and adapting its practices to become more sustainable. An effort that recently saw Catherine R. Unlimited be awarded a B Corp status, which is amazing. So over to you. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for having me. So I think the first thing to do is to explain exactly what a B Corp is for those of you who may not be familiar. And I'll share my screen because they have a very what I hope will be a recognisable logo that can be found sort of increasingly in your inboxes from companies. You bought something from years ago where lots of lots of companies are now considering it a very important sort of benchmark certification to attain. And it's a way of avoiding, we were talking about greenwashing earlier, of avoiding that because it is quite a rigorous process in order to become certified and B Corp, the organization are very sort of stringent in making sure that people are not just talking the talk, but also walking the walk. So in brief, a B Corp is a business that works to balance purpose and profit. So B Corp's meet verified standards of social and environmental performance and furthermore are legally bound to commit to sustainable practices. So the start of our B Corp journey was when Catherine, a company owner and the director of the studio, decided to make a real effort to follow a new business model that would allow her to achieve a better balance of purpose and profit. So we decided to undertake to become a B Corp because the organization requires businesses to complete a self assessment online. Now this assessment provides a really useful and really thorough framework within which a business can sort of situate its kind of improvements and its efforts in order to sort of adapt and change its business practices and system. And it provided us with really useful hints as to what we should embed into our daily practices and how exactly to legally commit ourselves to consider the impact of all of our decisions through kind of certain legal pathways. For what I mean by that is basically we changed and adapted our articles of the association and wrote an official mission statement which the business didn't have before and which our wager most conservation studios wouldn't think it would be necessary to have to really to sort of lock in our commitments to being sustainable. So we started very much from scratch and the process took about a year. I think it's fair to say that it entailed quite a steep learning curve for us all. And right at the beginning Catherine very rightly saw that we would need some help in understanding a lot of the terminology that goes with the territory of sustainability. We were faced with words like metrics and KPIs which turned out to be key performance indicators and scope one, two and three emissions which Nicola hopefully explained to us just now. So we were very lucky to be put in touch with a brilliant guy called Leon who was at the time a master's student in London in environmental sustainability and he acted as a sort of external consultant for us as we progressed through filling out the online assessment. We would have some semi-regular meetings with him and I'm able to ask him questions and he would let us know if we were on the right track. So the first step was to identify key data sets to collect and process which we based on the concerns of the B Corp framework including things like energy use, water use and waste generated and recycled. So crucially B Corp require this data to be collected over time so we had to first come up with ways of collecting, recording and analysing this data which we decided to do very simply in basic spreadsheets and I'll pop an example of an empty spreadsheet on there for now which I invite comments on and I'll come back to it later. This is just an example of something that we would have in our computer systems to fill out on a regular basis. Part of my role as studio manager is sort of weekly, monthly, depending on what it is we're measuring just to record for example what our water meter says that week and then over time we'll have data which shows if we're reducing the amount we're using, if the amount we're using was higher that month and then we can diagnose why that might be and do something about it. So while the focus of this panel is of course environmental sustainability I think it is important to take a brief detour here touching on something that Nicola was just saying about sustainability and inclusivity going hand in hand. Following the B Corp framework really made us realise that sustainability means more than operating in a greener way and it's equally about operating in a socially responsible way and in fact the two strands if you like are inextricably bound up. The B Corp self-assessment is structured around four key themes to encapsulate this. It's governance, community, environment and customers which are all given equal weighting, some environment just being a quarter of of what sustainability means from this holistic viewpoint. One of the most rewarding changes we've made as a company actually is to our governance structure where we've reworded our legal documents to count all of our regular workers including employees and freelancers as stakeholders and this then means that everyone's entitled to have a say in the running of the business and in maintaining the studio sustainability goals and from doing this it means we've had a chorus of voices to give feedback and input into any changes to company policies that we've made during our push to operate more sustainably. As a consequence the project and the journey as it is really belongs to everyone and its success is everyone's legal responsibility. So to return to the narrative of our B Corp journey, the next step is to identify areas where the studio was falling short of B Corp's requirements which was in most things to start with. I mean it did feel like a bit of a daunting task but luckily there were small steps to make as we progressed through the self-assessment which is why it was such a useful framework. So this is where sort of considering completing the assessment as a medium term project was useful. It was never going to happen overnight and it did as I said it did require about a year in order to design and implement both new studio processes and to write up official documentation that would commit us to our sustainability goals. While the majority of this work was done alongside Abu Dhabi studio we were able to take advantage of my own time out of the studio working remotely during the first lockdown to really kind of get my teeth into doing the tasks and also we had a remote work experience student at the time Chloe Chang who was based in Canada when we were filling out our assessment and we were able to sort of delegate her with kind of more time consuming tasks which I think she found very interesting, very rewarding. So for example Chloe looked at profiling all of our suppliers researching alternative greener options that were more local to the studio for example or that used more sustainable manufacturing methods. In my time I composed the mission statement I was talking about a code of ethics and a company policies document all of which are publicly available on our company website which I'll write in the chat box once I finish speaking if anyone's interested to look at them and this is designed to hold us accountable to our sustainability aims. So eventually we were able to go through the Abicor assessment online fill out our responses to arrive at a high enough score to be considered for verification and that process involved an interview and then for us to provide evidence in the form of all this data we've been collecting and the documentation we've been writing to show that we had been doing what we profess that we were doing. So to keep track of this goal like one example of the thing that we measure is our commitment to minimise shipping and business travel. So for this in a spreadsheet much like this one I showed you earlier we record journeys made by ourselves to a client's house for example or by shippers delivering works to and from the studio and then we work out the distances that they would have travelled and the carbon toll of these journeys. We for to work that out talking about not kind of reinventing the wheel and using resources that are available we use a company called Climate Care where they have a sort of carbon calculator online where I type in what distance was travelled by what kind of vehicle using what fuel and they work out the carbon toll of those journeys and then propose a cost to offset that carbon toll. So I'll just move to a different slide so you can see the studio and who I'm talking about and it's Catherine at the easel in the foreground there and my colleague Mia in the background so as you can see it's a relatively small studio and has been a good what I think a good sort of guinea pig in how spaces can be adapted to become more sustainable in conservation. So now that we've oriented the company policies and procedures as well as the studio space itself towards making positive social and environmental impacts we're now focusing on implementing changes to the actual processes of conservation and restoration which actually proved to be kind of too long term and I think that's a bit too challenging actually to sort of include in our initial B Corp verification. We just we didn't have tools to hand that we were using to collect the data and similarly to know which changes to make and it wasn't there was nothing that seemed to be readily available or very easy to incorporate into our practice in order to sort of make meaningful change in this way. So it'd be a wonderful thing to I know we'll talk about that later on that's I'm very keen for any questions or any comments that anyone might have in that regard. So there is fantastic research and resources and that have been made in recent years by various organisations in particular we're in the process of designing a system to record the carbon intensity of individual conservation projects by using the AIC online carbon calculator and that is where what this spreadsheet has been designed for will have can you see my cursor by any chance great so we'll have sort of the project there name is going to be for the conservator the treatment that's kind of being carried out on the painting the material is for which conservation materials will be used cotton buds and any solvents for example the amount of this material used and then the carbon intensity of having used the material which is something that the carbon calculator will be able to help us with which is something that actually we discovered after we'd gone through the process of our b-core assessment and have we sort of found it earlier we might have been able to incorporate that into our scope one emissions which just to remind you are the emissions that a company makes itself into that calculation but we didn't know so it'll be something for next time. So just to conclude then what I hope to have conveyed is that while committing to a sustainable practice may seem daunting it can absolutely be achieved just by taking it gradually and in small steps making changes incrementally and building up new ways of going about daily operations and cultivating new habits like collecting data. Another take home point is that data really is key you can't do anything without it but luckily it's something that's very easy to do and anyone can start doing it straight away and for free which is very important I know so we've been able to reach standards high enough to be counted as a b-corp without outsourcing much work to third parties or really disrupting the work of our studio and we're all quite surprised to be honest but it just shows that over the course of the year the incremental changes that gradually built up as we develop new habits made a huge difference it's just taken patience and commitment from the whole team to implement lasting changes that sometimes means a bit more admin to complete but is well worth it. Thank you Iris that was absolutely fascinating and it's clearly a very thorough process to become a b-corp under achievement that you should be justifiably proud of so let's move on to the questions and I hand over now to Roxy and Kate I can see there's one question in the Q&A but please fire off your questions for our panelists. Yes fire away we have some questions ourselves and I'm sure all of you do as well so please do include those. I will start off with the question that's already in the chat this is for Nicola have you changed to a renewable electricity supplier and I think this actually could apply to a lot of you who are all of our panelists but that was a question I had repeatedly and also this should dramatically reduce your scope to emissions or are you generating dry air on site with fossil fuels? So this is not an easy answer so yes basically if you one of the ways that you can completely eliminate your scope to emissions is to move to an energy supply supplier that uses completely renewables the carbon footprint per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on the method used to generate it but when you're choosing an energy supply you need to look at where they're getting their energy from I'm not sure how it works anywhere else in the world but in the UK people who generate energy sell it into the grid and then people who supply energy to customers buy it from the grid so if you are buying a green energy supply you are not having electricity coming directly from a wind turbine to your site you are having electricity coming still from the same grid that all of the other electricity comes from so the different organisations have got different ways of kind of squaring that off to make it green so you've got some organisations who the companies that are both energy generators and energy suppliers will say that they will generate a unit of green electricity for every unit of electricity they supply you and then you've got other suppliers so you have some suppliers who sell green electricity but they don't actually generate any electricity and there are various different kind of methods they use to do that and whether that includes offsetting whether that includes energy credits etc so you have to dig a little bit deeper to to work out kind of how green really is your energy supply and there are some kind of best best practice guidelines about that but the the reason it's unfortunately more complicated for us is that we firstly one of the reasons that most homes in the UK have got gas boilers is that providing heat with gas is much much cheaper than providing heat with electricity so as things currently stand gas is the only economically viable way for us to generate the heat that add the humidifiers need so that obviously is a situation that we need to move away from so one of the reasons that we're working so hard on like data and control algorithms and all that sort of stuff is that when we reach the point where it becomes well I'm hoping that at some point in the next decade it's going to become economically viable for us to move away from gas that's a political question rather than a technical question but when that day comes we need to make sure that we've got the best possible understanding of how the system works so that we can make sure that moving from gas to electricity isn't is not going to cause us any technical issues so there's a technical thing there and then there's also a kind of a bigger picture organizational thing and we actually buy our electricity as part of a like a buying club which is where we get together with lots of other organizations and because there's lots of us together that then makes us a big enough customer to negotiate deals so that's got pros and cons so that the con firstly where we're currently tied into a deal until 2023 so we're not in a position to change our supplier at the moment however when we get to the stage where it's time for us to change our supplier I think if I've understood correctly we are one of the kind of bigger members of that group in terms of our buying in terms of our consumption so in theory that should mean that we've got some influence when the time comes to renew our deal so my job is to make sure that the person on our board who is responsible for interfacing with that group is well briefed on what to be looking for when that time comes and that we can use our influence to try and make sure that we that we get the right the right deal when that time comes so the short answer is no we're not on the moment but the long answer is that we're working very hard on it that's great super interesting key um so I have we have another question from the chat and this is for Lois um and the question in is is it possible to share the work of Chloe Lucas in order to know more sustainable options oh yeah Chloe Chang so what I would yeah what I would suggest you do I put our studio email address um in the chat um which is studio at kathrynara.com kathryn k-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e-a-r-a.com um because I think it's quite um I mean though it was a lot of a lot of work for her um going through kind of all different kind of suppliers um looking at everything and I think it is specific to kind of where you are um what exactly you need for example there are certain things that we just haven't been able to replace at the moment for example eyes and glass is a bit of a nightmare from a sustainability point of view um but that's something that we we need to kind of is a bigger project experimenting with alternatives um and kind of I suppose waiting for something that that is a good enough alternative to be manufactured which will come from demand from people asking for it I suppose so um I think um very happy to answer kind of specific questions about um sustainable alternatives but it might be um better to send us an email and of course um we'll share share with you kind of if we've found anything good um for sort of what you're thinking of specifically thank you I know a lot of people would find that very helpful so all right um I don't see any more from the audience so I'm going to ask perhaps one um of Milba um I'm just curious I loved what you said about um sort of leaning into our strengths as a conservation community and looking at sort of what we can do and and where we sit in that um I'm curious sort of what you would suggest the first steps for somebody who wants to embrace that way of thinking and that sort of integrating you know private practice or integrating just your personal work with the sustainable mindset I'm sort of interested in you know where you started with that in that on that journey and how you sort of went about it um I just did it um I think that's what everyone should do um you have to um as you say you have to lean out really and get yourself into the the conversations for instance if we're talking about textiles um the the clothing company toast is running a um an online series on on makers which also encompasses textile artists and um um and people who do mending um and so I I've I tuned into some of those conversations and it really exasperated me that there wasn't a conservation a textile conservation voice in there because there were it was it was extremely interesting in all different viewpoints although it was a little bit um either the mending is invisible or it's Japanese and covered in gold you know and I think whether there are really um a lot of European techniques that people maybe don't know so much about and it would be fascinating for textile conservators to just um share the the beauty of the old men's that they come across so going into the more aesthetic I suppose um and I was delighted to see that the independent textile conservators Zenzie Tinker uh who's based in Brighton uh was eventually part of um an event that I think Selvidge magazine ran again with with um different people who who um focused on mending so I I think it's it's important to know what's happening where and to to just um to keep your ear to the ground and then to make sure that you um invite or you know ask ask for an invitation in in the places where where these discussions are being held um for instance I think um if you're familiar with the uh sustainability group Julie's bicycle who do lots of really really uh good work some of it funded by the Arts Council England um and I suppose I'm quite frustrated there that the whole of the museums and galleries um sector is um it doesn't have that you know the conservation element in the discussion so I think it's um it's just much of getting in there is that answer it yeah no I think that's a really nice sort of way of thinking about it just thinking more broadly beyond the bench so to speak um yeah thank you did you like we have um a really great question from Debra that I'm going to ask to everyone and I know we're approaching 3 p.m um so I understand if some people have to leave but I think this is just a really lovely question um so what does the panel suggest might be big wins um you know given that we are in an emergency time really is of the essence um what would be big wins and what would be easy wins um you know in other words good places to start you know easy places to make an impact sooner um you know and what things are going to be a little bit more challenging that maybe we don't want to start with you know for for people who are listening who are looking for a nice place to start um to be more sustainable in their practice or collections here um and Lois if we could start with you yeah sure I'm I'm just thinking kind of the the easiest changes that we made were to our studio space itself and actually a lot of them have ended up um saving us money so they don't go into kind of issues about profitability um or some re-budgeting um so we changed all of our light bulbs to be LED which cut our energy bills energy consumption a huge amount I think um the the first step that I would suggest to everyone to to do who's interested is to just start collecting really basic sets of data energy use water use waste use over six months three to six months probably three months is absolutely fine and find out kind of what you're using um and then make a few easy changes um we fitted a lime scale um inhibitor which has helped um kind of regulate our kind of water supply to the studio we changed to LED lights um and we by kind of weighing our waste every week we're really conscious um when we've just kind of been throwing too many things away or kind of buying things that have been too much packaging and it becomes very clear so I think just doing really kind of basic things that maybe won't interfere too much with kind of daily practices um is a really excellent way to start and just to kind of click into the mindset um of kind of forming new habits and and acting more sustainably thank you Lois that's really wonderful practical information which I think I am I am at least I'm always searching for um Nicola do you want to answer that same question so what would be some easy places or um places with a nice impact for people to start um yeah so I I would um I would I would second the light bulbs actually it's amazing how big a difference it makes um but I think it depends it depends on what kind of an organization you are and the answer to that question is going to be different for everyone um so I can talk a bit about about um what what we what we've done and what we've had um big successes from the the kind of the move that we've made recently that I am most proud of is that we've taken all of our um all of our investment all of our endowment funding and all of our pensions now from fossil fuels we don't have any any of our investment portfolio invested in fossil fuels um it's a very easy one to not think about because it's not visible in your day-to-day life um but um it's it was surprisingly easy to do like there are people out there who know who's investing in fossil fuels um who's not um the kind of ethics of the various um banks etc are are quite um reasonably well known and it's um so yeah I was I was really pleased that our um board was supportive of that and and that's what our organization has done so that's actually probably the biggest thing that we've done aside from um kind of well I'm hoping I'm hoping that our work to cut our own energy use will become a big thing but um that's that's still in progress um and in terms of the easiest um again it's it's kind of the things that you do most often I think are the ones that you can make the most change with with the small things I love I love again that practical advice so thank you Nicola and then finally Ilva what do you think is a good place for folks to start uh well it's great to go last because everybody said things that obviously was going to say first but I think uh also starting with ourselves we talked about the professional practice and the you know professional space but um why I think one needs to um to reform every part of of our lives and therefore starting with maybe um reducing the temperature in office spaces and office environments and actually wearing jumpers and um not um you know not pretending that things are the way they they always were um I've talked quite a bit about clothing and textiles because of passion revolution being my passion and and there are things there that you can you can do as well as all the the practical professional uh practice things that have already been mentioned that you can still make part of that effort and that you can um publicize even as part of that effort so um I think that's my contribution obviously um reduce and reuse all the packaging you possibly can at work and and share those resources share um for instance you know for big decants uh of collections that I've been involved in making sure that the uh all the specialist packaging and the shelving and whichever can be um used by somebody else and I'm just making sure that that resource is shared we love that because we really do need to do you know everything both personally and professionally so thank you Ova so I think we're out of time but we do have one last question that I just thought I would read out as a reflection for everyone including the panelists um uh so it says regarding the urgency and very very limited time in which climate action has to happen how would you answer this question do the measures we are already taking and want to take really need the urgency of the crisis so I think certainly um that is something to all dwell on and think about as we're as we're watching the events unfold in COP26 so thank you all for um attending this event and for participating uh and having so many questions that we ran out of time um so yeah we hope to do this again this would be a really great collaboration to keep going uh and you know this is a global crisis so having a global audience is really important so um thank you all for your uh attention