04 Feb 2025
The 2025 Sustainability Festival has relaunched with a pioneering new look.
The format will see the annual springtime event transform into a year-long series of SustFest ‘Seasons’, with four key weekends throughout the year. Each four-day weekend will be focusing on a different theme and highlighting the various elements of sustainability as the year unfolds.
Last year ‘SustFest’ took over The Alban Arena for three days of guest speakers, workshops, crafts, live music, networking, interactive activities and fashion shows. With more than 2,000 guests engaging in the festival last year, it would have been easy for the SustFest committee to repeat the Expo for a second consecutive year.
Lee Wood, part of the events committee, explained the reasoning behind another new format for 2025: “Of course it was always going to be difficult to eclipse what was achieved with last year’s expo, however it was important that we keep growing and developing the festival year upon year.
“We were looking at the original SustFest format for inspiration and began the process of creating our
most ambitious project to date.
“We have so many amazing green organisations and sustainable initiatives in the district and felt that providing just one weekend to showcase their work was quite restrictive and wouldn’t do the projects justice.”
The four weekends, each including a sustainability market in Harpenden, will promote different themes and focus on a key area of sustainability work around St Albans, Harpenden and the local villages.
The themed ‘seasons’ are:
March 14-17: Biodiversity;
May 16-19: Local to global;
September 19-22: Travel & Transport;
November 14-17: Ten years of SustFest.
Chair of Sustainable St Albans, Jill Watson, who is also a member of the SustFest committee, hopes that the introduction of the new format will encourage a wider range of events.
She explained: “We’re hoping that introducing themes will add an additional layer of focus that would have been
otherwise difficult under the festival’s previous schedule. “Many of the community groups involved with SustFest have expressed interest in running events at different times of year or maybe a series of activities, so this will give that wider flexibility.
“Anyone can host an event at any of the four weekends, irrespective of its focus all ideas and topic will fit in. That’s the brilliant allure of sustainability, the connections are greater than you’d initially have expected and you’ll always find a correlation between the most seemingly opposite of topics.”
2025 is also a landmark year for Sustainable St Albans and the event committee, as they celebrate a decade of the Sustainability Festival.
“We owe so much so those original pioneers of Sustainable St Albans who identified a need to celebrate what was happening locally and pull people together for positive change” explained Lee.
“The baton has been carried with great passion for over a decade and each year we’ve seen a growth in the local sustainability scene and 2025 will be a celebration of that achievement.”
If you’re interested in signing up to host an event this year, you can visit www.sustainablestalbans.org/submit-a-sustfest-event for more information.
