Experts On How to Mitigate the Ethical and Environmental Impacts of Collecting Art

October 2, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Artists like Tom Friedman transform trash, corrosion and entropy into new forms of sustainability. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin

Most of us try to be good individually and to do our best to make the world a little better even as we know it’ll never be enough. But when our individual efforts become part of collective action, good things can happen. In the fine art world, one increasingly hears terms like “ethical” and “sustainable” being used in reference to art advising, installation practices, upcycled mediums and even curation. These are concepts that aren’t fully defined in the cultural sphere, particularly when it comes to collecting art, but can generally be summed up as ‘doing-the-right-thing.’

Ethical collecting refers both to what is purchased and how one buys works of art. For instance, an ethical collector will not participate in the black market by purchasing stolen or looted art or other cultural objects—something that takes a bit of work, as one must know from whom one is buying and research the provenance of desired items. The former is not just a matter of ethics but also of law, since legally one cannot have title to stolen property of any type; owning objects that were taken from somewhere illegally may result in civil lawsuits or even criminal arrests. Gaps in provenance should be a red flag to prospective buyers. “The provenance has to be rock-solid,” New York City art advisor Todd Levin told Observer, “or I don’t get involved.”

Truly ethical collecting extends beyond strictly legal matters, however. Collecting may seem more like colonizing if artworks or cultural objects were acquired, however legally, from Asian peoples, Native American or African tribes at the cost of depleting their cultural heritage. An ethical collector might ask, is this item something that I should own? A growing number of museums are doing just that, and returning items that have a living meaning to a particular community.

Ethics also come into play when collecting contemporary art. Is the artist being given a fair price for his or her work? If a living artist’s work is sold on the secondary market, should that artist or the artist’s estate receive a “resale royalty”—a percentage of the profit—from that sale, a practice that has been codified in law in most every country but the United States? In the U.S. ethics and practical considerations bump up against each other. We all look to pay less than full list price, after all, and no one pays a royalty to Ford or GM after purchasing a used car.

Some artists argue that they should be compensated when their work is exhibited in museums or other nonprofit art spaces, claiming that they are giving value to those organizations and getting nothing in return. Perhaps the exposure of their work to the public will lead to sales that benefit the artists, but that isn’t guaranteed. Ethics isn’t always clear-cut.

“Sustainable” collecting has a more specific meaning, referring to reducing the carbon footprint that is part of the transport of art. “The art trade is notoriously negligent with regard to the creation of waste,” art advisor Candace Worth told Observer, adding that one of the most visible signs of that wastefulness is all the discarded crates and packing material that are involved in the shipment of art. Art regularly is on the move, transported between galleries, auction houses and collectors, sent here or there for exhibitions, traveling to art fairs on this or that continent, and the process of all this movement involves packing materials and crates that often are used only once. “People don’t have space for the crates, so they just get rid of them,” echoed art advisor Suzanne Gyorgy.

The type of crates that most individual collectors and museums use consist of a wooden box, usually made of MDO (medium density overlay) plywood, which is durable and waterproof, and inside is a polymer-based foam core that protects against shocks. Derek Jones, one of the owners of art storage and moving company Atelier Fine Art Services, told Observer that there are over a dozen different types of foams, all of which exude some amount of gas that may have an adverse effect on the artwork if it stays in the crate for long periods of time. “The best foam in terms of absorbing shocks and vibrations actually produces the most gas,” he said, adding that, unfortunately, “there is no good substitute for foam.” Some foam cores are made from algae, which eliminates the need for those made out of fossil fuels, but Jones said that they haven’t been fully tested for their ability to withstand vibrations and if they might attract rodents.

Single crates range in price, from $500 to $5,000, and they can be reused—”a well-built crate can last 15 years,” he said, adding that the foam core has to be replaced in five years—but need to be stored in climate-controlled facilities, such as those at Atelier. Storing a crate in a normal basement will destroy it. In the short term, storing a crate is less expensive than building a new one, but most collectors are not likely to be shipping their artworks often so, in time, it is less expensive to just junk them. “Everyone wants to do the right thing, but it’s just hard.”

Some crates and packing materials are reused, for artworks that will be shopped at one art fair after another, and some dealers consolidate shipments, putting more than one artwork in a crate at a time, but that doesn’t go very far in solving the problem. What if Painting 2 sells but Painting 1 does not? Now, the two works will be shipped separately, each requiring its own crate. Then there is the matter of transporting all these crates of art, usually in airplanes or vans that themselves produce large amounts of carbon emissions. The most ecological way to combat all this would be for a collector in Darien to only buy artworks from an artist in Darien so crating and shipping is minimized or eliminated, though that’s unlikely to ever happen.

Art fairs pose a problem for those focused on sustainability, but these fairs also solve one aspect of the sustainability problem at the same time. The main alternative to having one site where collectors may look at the artwork exhibited at 100 different galleries is for collectors to travel to those same 100 galleries in numerous cities in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, which generates its own automotive or jet fuel pollution. Another alternative might be for collectors not to go anywhere to see art but just look at images on a computer screen—something that again, is unlikely to happen. “That’s exactly the conundrum,” Manhattan art advisor Megan Fox Kelly told Observer, noting that “there is a growing effort within the art world to reduce the environmental impact of shipping, storage, packing, climate control and travel,” which is where the fine art storage and transportation industry comes in.

There is yet one more term that is gaining currency in the cultural field, “sustainable tourism,” which refers to efforts by (mostly) European municipal governments to limit the number of people who are permitted to visit cultural sites at one time. They include timed reservation systems in order to regulate visitor flow (such as the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, Versailles in France, the UNESCO World Heritage Site Pompeii, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy and the Vatican Museum in Rome, as well as in numerous national parks in the U.S., including Acadia, Glacier, Muir Woods, Rocky Mountain, Yosemite and Zion), limiting the number of rental units (Barcelona, Spain, and Venice, Italy, among others) and tourist taxes to pay for tourism’s economic and environmental impacts (Edinburgh, Scotland and Iceland, among others). Collectors looking to reduce their carbon footprints or their overall impact on the world should consider taking a page from these initiatives.