Reducing the Mary Rose Museum’s carbon footprint
In the last few years we have worked hard to build up a picture of how much energy the Mary Rose Trust uses in the Museum, offices, and conservation facilities. With this data we have been able to make significant changes to reduce our energy use.
The large area where the ship is on display, the Weston Ship Hall, is air conditioned to keep the temperature and humidity stable for the preservation of the ship. This air conditioning system uses a lot of energy, but we have been able to make small changes to the systems that have reduced their energy use. This includes raising the temperature the system is set at in summer and lowering it in winter and adjusting the speed of the fans that push the air around the systems. These small changes have had a big impact on reducing our energy consumption but importantly haven’t affected the environmental conditions of the Weston Ship Hall.
Making our conservation studios more sustainable
The Mary Rose Trust has several conservation studios, some of which have large pieces of equipment that use lots of energy and produce waste.
We recently achieved the gold award for LEAF, a sustainable laboratories, and studios framework. This means that we have worked hard to look at the waste produced by the conservation studios to decrease this, to recycle and reuse more. We use sustainability assessments to make our projects more environmentally friendly and we work together with partner organisations on being more sustainable.
Renewable energy
We are currently looking at the feasibility of using renewable energy sources on site to provide some of the required power needed to care for our collection. This includes assessing the potential for using solar panels on our unique roof.
