It’s 2am and the drinks are flowing, music is grooving and there’s a rhythmic flow of people bumping and grinding on the dance floor. You take a sip of your organic beer in its polycarbon cup and think its time to break the seal, and head to the rainwater fed toilets. As you make your way through the sea of bodies in the low-wattage lit club, there’s a slight movement in the floor coming from the springboards that it’s mounted on, which capture the energy produced from dancing and convert it into electricity.  

Welcome to the latest of idealistic innovations in sustainable clubbing. That’s right, eco-friendly status with the hope to be fully sustainable nightclubs. Lets get down with our bad selves! Plans to open in early July in the UK are touted with hopeful seeds being planted for similarly run bars and nightclubs in New York, Cape Town, Amsterdam and Rio. Consider for a moment about how much heat, trash (debris, not the trash wearing the eff me pumps), and pure energy is expelled out of bars and nightclubs today. We all contribute to it, going out and having fun is extremely important to the well being and happiness of many responsible adults. What if this energy could be harnessed into supplying the very business that is churning it?

Enter Dr. Earth. An entrepreneur whose alias I am still attempting to uncover, Dr. Earth seems to aspire to be the Al Gore of nightclubs. Behind the concept of club4climate, he is attempting to spread the message of green nightclubbing and is even promoting an earth friendly private island destination, due to open in 2010. Perhaps a green Ibiza?  While “hedonism not destruction” is a noble concept, Dr. Earth’s attempts to donate his profits to Friends of Earth are unwanted due to the island concept’s encouragement of international air travel. Nevertheless he attempts to party on, hosting green parties across London and hoping to spread his message through the world.

The entertainment business as a whole is such a huge market, it makes you wonder just how much bars, restaurants and nightclubs are adding to our carbon footprint. Even for those that support local farming and organically grown produce, is it adequate for these establishments to be serving conscious foods without eco-friendly means of producing them? Seek and ye shall find: while researching this article I stumbled across www.dinegreen.com, the Green Restaurant Association’s website. You can find a small but solid database of restaurants that adhere to the GRA’s environmental guidelines, and they also list tips, suggestions and endorsed products for consumers and those in the restaurant biz. While it doesn’t look like there are any nightclub or bar listings for the party people and aspiring alcoholics, evidence suggests that it’s all on the up and up. We are slowly coming into eco submission, proving that just about everything and everyone can take a stab at sustainability and earth friendliness.

Similar articles that might also interest you:

Comments