GREEN GIANT The L-Acoustics deployment at the ChangeNOW 2025 environmental summit underscores its company-wide passion for greener practices and projects
by Climate Fresk workshops delivered in partnership with the UN’s training institute. “We’ve been tracking our full carbon footprint for three years,” explains Françoise Cardoso, sustainability and social impact executive director at L-Acoustics. “This includes our own operations and everything up and down our supply chain, which is still unusual in professional audio. You can’t reduce what you haven’t measured. We’ve also invested in collaboration rather than competition where sustainability is concerned, because no manufacturer answers these questions alone. We’re a founding partner of MATRICE, a collective initiative with Live Nation France, Ekhoscènes and others to measure the real carbon footprint of touring productions. “We co-developed HELA – Healthy Ears, Limited Annoyance – with the World Health Organisation, translating research on safe sound exposure into practical frameworks for venues and engineers; our L Series of loudspeakers was recognised with a Décibel d’Or Award from France’s Conseil National du Bruit (National Council on Noise), the first time an audio manufacturer received the distinction. In 2025, we joined 16 other multinationals to launch the Engage & Care Coalition, focused on living wages and worker wellbeing across global supply chains.” She adds: “Additionally, we have chosen to be audited. B Corp certification keeps all of it under independent review, on a cycle. That recurring check is really what separates a commitment from a claim. We feel it’s important to make the path visible enough for others to follow.” As the live entertainment industry looks towards 2027, a genuinely sustainable production will be defined by more than a single environmental commitment or innovation. Practical alternatives are already emerging, with battery-powered systems, longer-lasting equipment, more efficient audio technology and independently assessed sustainability strategies all helping to reshape established ways of working. There is no single solution to the industry’s environmental challenges, but the direction is clear: the future of live productions must be built around smarter resource use, cleaner energy and greater responsibility at every level. By 2027, the real measure of progress will not be how many productions call themselves sustainable, but how much sustainability has become part of the way the people and companies behind them operate.
to test this at scale, with LIDO Festival running entirely on batteries in 2025.” Held at London’s Victoria Park, LIDO Festival operated on large-scale, renewable-power battery systems. With the ambition of turning LIDO into one of London’s most sustainable festivals, the focus extended beyond reducing environmental impact to consider how the industry can rethink its approach to power, waste and community engagement. Working alongside headliner Massive Attack, whose commitment to battery-powered performance helped drive the ambition, the team challenged conventional approaches to festival power infrastructure. By maximising existing grid connections, deploying battery storage and introducing a green hydrogen system in an industry-first application, the project showed how innovative energy solutions can reduce reliance on traditional power generation. “The battery systems are reliable and use less energy overall by instantaneously ramping up/down with demand from the audio,” continues Land. “A diesel generator would need to run at a constant max level to account for peaks – as if by magic, this reduces power consumption by around 90%. Making these container-size batteries standard is easily the most significant development that I’ve seen, and it’s no surprise when looking at the rate of grid-scale batteries being deployed that can power an entire country.”
BUILDING A GREENER FUTURE Recently, France-based loudspeaker
manufacturer L-Acoustics achieved B Corp certification. To achieve this, a business must meet high standards of social and environmental performance. For L-Acoustics, this began with a rewrite of its statutes to embed sustainability into its core purpose, and in late 2023, the company appointed a sustainability director to its executive committee, ensuring that social and environmental considerations are represented alongside R&D, sales and operations in strategic decision-making. Sustainability has also been integrated into the employee experience, with every new hire now signing the company’s Sustainability Charter. To translate its ambitions into everyday action across its global operations, L-Acoustics has established a network of 20 Sustainability Champions, each dedicating four days a year to advancing the strategy at their respective sites. This work is supported
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