Journey to greener ground with WWF at Grand Designs Live

Interactive show feature takes visitors on a journey to a more sustainable lifestyle

8-10 June 2007, ExCeL London

Ticket Hotline: 0870 380 0342

Visitors to this year’s Grand Designs Live (8-10 June, ExCeL London) will discover how One Planet Living® can be made easy, affordable, and attractive, in a unique feature, ‘Journey to One Planet Living’ developed by WWF, the world’s largest independent conservation organisation.

In its third consecutive year, the award winning, record-breaking event Grand Designs Live will work with WWF to create a feature that will inform, educate and entertain visitors on the serious and topical issue of climate change and the need for us to reduce our rampant use of the planet’s resources.

The feature will highlight WWF’s One Planet Campaign, which supports the vision of One Planet Living®.

That is, if everyone in the world consumed the planet’s natural resources at the same rate as people in the UK, we would need three planets to support us.

WWF has made every effort to ensure that its feature is as sustainable as possible by using natural, environmentally friendly materials to create an interactive and inventive experience for visitors in the GRANDBuild section of the show. Focused on detailing the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’, the thought-provoking feature will focus on the key areas of our homes and lifestyles that go towards making up this footprint.

As the visitors enter WWF’s feature, they will be faced with a wall of recycled televisions showing how One Planet Living® can be easily incorporated into everyday living.

The next step of the journey will guide visitors through a series of displays that demonstrate the main causes of environmental damage, ranging from transportation and burning fossil fuels, to purchasing foreign and out of season foods. Games like ‘Wot no Fish’, which represents the world’s depleting fish stocks via an interactive puzzle, will be informative, fun and memorable.

Each display will offer advice on alternative options and achievable solutions that can be put into practice in everyday life, to help reduce the impact of our modern lifestyles on the planet.

World-renowned artist Ptolemy Elrington, famous for transforming discarded shopping trolleys and car hubcaps into beautiful sculptures, is showing his support for WWF’s One Planet Living® campaign by designing a huge suspended globe from waste products.

At the end of the walk through feature, visitors will have the opportunity to calculate their environmental impact using WWF’s computerised ecological footprint calculator.

WWF will work closely with the show organisers to ensure the show’s impact on the environment is lessened, including reducing C02 emissions to using sustainable materials and ethical catering.

Colin Butfield, WWF’s Head of Campaigns, said: "Last year’s show and our One Planet Living® feature was a huge success, providing WWF with a platform to communicate key messages about sustainable living to a 50,000 plus audience. People at the show were amazingly receptive to the need for more sustainable living and many commented that One Planet Living® is the perfect blueprint to a greener future. We’re delighted to be back on board in 2007 with a new, interactive feature, to help visitors understand about footprint and the impact we’re all having on the planet."

Tickets are priced at £14 in advance or £18 on the door (children under 16 receive entry for free)

About Grand Designs Live
Grand Designs Live was launched on 10th June 2005 at ExCeL London – one of the newest and most prestigious exhibition venues in Europe. Over 43,000 visitors attended the launch show over three days. The second Grand Designs Live London event, which took place 2-4 June 2006, attracted an attendance of 50,182. The launch of Grand Designs Live NEC attracted over 42,000 visitors in October 2006.

Grand Designs Live is a broad-based show but with a common theme and a specific target audience. The exhibition grew from the extremely popular talkbackTHAMES-produced TV series for Channel 4, Grand Designs, into a vibrant 3-D live environment that lives up to the Grand Designs brand and its values. The exhibition provides visitors with products, information, services and advice for their very own Grand Design – whether it is a total self-build project, a refurbishment of an existing building or tweaking a room with fresh furnishings.

This is a show about excitement, inspiration, creativity, ingenuity, design, tenacity, determination, aspiration and turning dreams in to reality.

Voted ‘Consumer Show of the Year’ in the AEO Awards and ‘Best Consumer Exhibition’ in the Event Awards, Grand Designs Live has grown from strength to strength since its launch in 2005.

WWF is now known simply by its initials and the panda logo.

WWF’s One Planet Campaign supports the vision of One Planet Living®.

The One Planet Campaign aims to show the links between our consumption of the planet’s resources and its impact on global biodiversity. It will focus on various impact areas, notably the Homes and Power sectors, and later activities will centre on Transport and Food.

One Planet Living® is a Registered Trademark identifying the joint initiative of WWF and BioRegional based on 10 guiding principles of sustainability. The vision of One Planet Living® is a world in which people everywhere can lead happy, healthy lives within their fair share of the Earth’s resources.

One Planet Living® will show how this is possible by establishing One Planet Living® communities in Europe, the US, China, South Africa and Australia. Each community will include homes, schools, factories, health and leisure facilities, transport and food links.

WWF’s mission
The mission of WWF is to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment, and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature, by:
* conserving the world’s biological diversity;
* ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable;
* reducing pollution and wasteful consumption

About FremantleMedia Licensing Worldwide (FLW)

FremantleMedia Licensing Worldwide (FLW) is the licensing division of FremantleMedia, one of the largest international creators and producers of programme brands in the world, with leading prime time drama, serial drama, entertainment and factual entertainment programming in over 40 territories.

FremantleMedia is the content arm of the RTL Group, Europe’s largest television and radio broadcast company.