On the path to sustainable events

When it comes to planning a ‘sustainable’ event, there can be few people who have amassed as much knowledge on the subject as Ed Cook. Having personally helped to dispose of waste from Glastonbury (not a task for the faint-hearted, surely) and set the recycling targets for London 2012, Cook is steeped in all things sustainable and his expertise has helped design and execute strategies for some of the highest-profile events on the planet.

From the outset, I am interested in trying to define the scope of what might make a ‘sustainable event’, as it seems, from my reading at least, to be a flexible concept that can be as narrow or broad as the occasion demands.

“It’s about meeting the needs of the current population without overburdening the people of the future,” says Cook, whose quickness of response leads me to think I may not have been the first person to ask him the question.

“Of course we have to make that reasonable and practical at the outset,” he adds. “There’s no point of bringing in all sorts of sustainability measures if it makes the event unworkable, or too expensive. For me it’s about identifying the ‘easy wins’ you can deliver as an event planner or organiser, and to identify those wins you need to start measuring your environmental impact.”

Helpfully, Cook, who works for Resource Futures, an independent environmental consultancy, has put together a blog post which outlines exactly what steps an event planner should take. In this context we are discussing how to apply sustainability measures to (primarily) meetings and conferences.

Broadly speaking the starting point is to work out the impact of your event. That means sitting down and mapping out the entire course of the event, working out the impact of audience travel, waste, food and drink, energy, transport (event logistics) and production and purchasing (there are websites that you can use for this purpose, such as www.calculator.carbonfootprint.com). The next step is try and make a plan to reduce some of these impacts, setting realistic goals you can achieve; it may not be feasible to do everything but cutting back on your biggest impact might deliver some real benefits.

The next stage is to ‘let your contractors do the work’. That sounds straightforward enough but it may take time to explain to organise and explain, so it’s best to include a contractual obligation for caterers to use recyclable packaging, for example. The next is to ‘get some good bins in’, which separate waste types into clearly signed receptacles. An added bonus is to ensure waste contractors are upfront about what happens to the waste afterwards, as it’s no use to find out later that it goes straight to landfill. Cook’s final point is to ensure that a planner ‘starts simple’, with his favourite ‘green initiative’ being to make sure delegates are given advice around how to minimise the carbon footprint of their own travel plans: that may be to car share, using public transport or even walking or cycling to an event, where practical.

“Indications are that audience travel is probably the greatest impact of most events and it’s a surprisingly simple measure to target and take action on,” adds Cook.

“Quite often this involves simply providing information; there are some studies that show when people make decisions about travel they often choose a less environmentally beneficial option through simple lack of information or planning. Imagine you’ve got a conference booked in, you’ve signed up some time ago and as it’s near you think ‘how am I going to get there?’. Quite often you just jump in a car on your own, where there are lots of car-sharing platforms now, and simple sites providing information on public transport. These interventions are effectively free for organisers; it’s a little bit of planning time, and not much you have to do on the ground.”