Three mobile parklets toured UK campuses for graduate recruitment between October and November 2022. They were used 58 times in six weeks, which is what makes the per-use carbon the number that matters.
PwC · UK universities · Various, UK · 2022 · Finance and professional services · Design; Production; Project Management
PwC recruits graduates on campus, in competition with every other large professional services firm, at the same universities in the same weeks. The brief was a mobile recruitment presence for the October to November 2022 season: three parklets, touring UK universities, each a self-contained outdoor unit a small team could install and strike repeatedly without a venue build. The commercial logic is repetition. A structure that works once is a cost per event. A structure that works fifty-eight times is an asset, and the build is amortised across every use rather than charged to one.
Three parklets, built as separate units. Each is a framed outdoor structure on a steel and aluminium chassis, sized to be transported to a campus and installed by a small team. Carcassing and internal surfaces were FSC MDF. Signage and light-transmitting panels were Greencast recycled cast acrylic. The canopy was PVC-free polyester, chosen so the weather cover is a single-polymer fabric rather than a coated laminate that cannot be recycled. Decking and seating used reclaimed pallet wood. Screens were not bought new: three refurbished second-hand televisions were sourced through WEEE4Future and fitted into the units, with interactive content running on pre-owned iPads. Power was the other decision. The parklets ran on solar generators rather than diesel or a mains tie-in, which made them deployable on ground with no power supply and removed generator fuel from the footprint entirely.
Fifty-eight installations in six weeks. A single-show booth is built to survive one install, one week in place and one strike. These three had to go up and come down roughly twenty times each, outdoors, in October and November, powered by solar generators with no mains supply and no venue infrastructure. That drives every decision: steel and aluminium rather than sheet material for anything structural, a single-polymer canopy that can be cleaned rather than replaced, pallet wood decking that can be swapped board by board, and screens that are cheap to replace because they were refurbished in the first place.
Three carbon figures exist, one per parklet: Central 1,726kg CO2e, Laser 1,807kg, Northern 1,974kg, on a scope covering all logistics from production through to final destination, production energy, and the embodied carbon of materials. These three figures are not added together and no tour total is published, because shared production energy and shared material components may be allocated across all three units, so summing them would double count. They are stated separately for that reason. Three refurbished second-hand screens saved 60kg CO2e and 54kg of e-waste, a figure supplied by WEEE4Future with no method shown. The footprint was offset using gold standard carbon credits. Indicative, calculated in house, not independently audited.