Keep your meeting close to home
If many of your attendees live close to your home office or are concentrated in a certain area, consider holding the meeting in that location.
Environmental Savings: Reduces flight carbon emissions.
Utilise eco-friendly hotels & venues
Choosing a venue that has eco-friendly elements is the best way to ensure a big return on your environmental investment.
Environmental Savings: Produces reduction in all of the following areas: carbon emissions from energy use, urban heat island effect, waste through recycling and composting, water use, and laundry and cleaning harmful chemical use.
Keep venues & activities within walking distance
If your event uses multiple properties or has off-property events, keep all of your venues within walking distance. Provide maps of walking trails and routes to off-site events, or include information about the local public transit system.
Environmental Savings: Lowers vehicle carbon emissions.
Use shuttles or busses instead of single car transfers
If airport transfers must be utilised, use shuttles and busses (be sure the vehicles are close to capacity) instead of single transfer cars.
Environmental Savings: Diminishes vehicle carbon emissions.
Know your group’s food preferences
By knowing your group’s history and getting real attendance numbers in advance, you can tailor your menus to minimise food waste.
Environmental Savings: Minimises food waste and decomposition greenhouse gasses.
Serve in bulk
Use hotel provided water pitchers or water stations in lieu of bottled water, and serve condiments and other food items in bulk to minimise packaging
Environmental Savings: Eliminates plastic waste and carbon emissions from plastic production and recycling
Choose local, in-season catering whenever possible
Utilising the meeting communities local, in-season catering supports the hosting community and provides the freshest produce and food options for your guests.
Environmental Savings: Decreases carbon emissions for food transport
Eliminate paper
Use email to promote the event, including online registration. Post meeting materials to your company intranet site or put them on a flash drive to send home with attendees
Environmental Savings: Brings down paper waste and carbon emissions from paper production and recycling
Be conservative with giveaways and gifts
If you are planning to give a gift to attendees, choose a gift that attendees will use and that is environmentally friendly.
Environmental Savings: Shrinks waste and carbon emissions from production
Consult the Maxvantage Strategic Meeting Management Team
The team is ready to assist you in implementing green meeting elements from point A to Z.
Environmental and economic savings are customisable by each event and can be tracked and reported to you either by event or on companywide level.
Article source: Conworld.net The global meetings industry portal
More about Maxvantage
Maxvantage is a strategic alliance between Maritz Travel and American Express Business Travel that leverages the collective experience and capabilities of these leaders to drive return on meetings investment and return on experience, offering a center of excellence for strategic meetings management needs. They deliver a comprehensive SMM offering with end-to-end servicing including expert sourcing, registration and planning services designed to reduce risk and optimize spend. They offer strategies for gaining visibility and transparency into your meetings spend, and we deliver experiences that drive business results. Find out more about Maxvantage by following this link.
Useful links related to greening your events, conferences and facilities:
- How to green your hotel – area by area - http://www.greenstuff.co.za/information/section-3/How-To-Go-Green.html
- Download the Green Events checklist provided by the World Forum, The Hague by clicking here
- Find out more about the World Forum, The Hague, Netherlands here
- The Green Leaf Environmental Standard is an international standard that measures green accommodation, green business, green products, green conferencing and green events. Follow this link to find out more about Green Leaf
- Heritage Eco-Events is a unique initiative designed to recognise meetings, conferences, concerts, sporting events and exhibitions that have been developed and held in a sustainable and responsible manner. The programme has been developed to recognise and encourage responsible and sustainable event management and encourages event organisers and companies to address the environmental impacts that their activities will have. Find out more about Heritage Eco Events from the Heritage Environmental Management Company here.
- COP 17 takes place in Durban from 28 November to 9 December 2011. Find out more about 2 a Degree: South Africa’s Response to Climate Change, a publication by Delta Environmental Centre. The book will be issued to all 30 000 delegates – follow this link for more information on 2 a Degree if you would like to participate in the publication and highlight your venue’s environmental initiative Green-Event-Check-List-The-World-Forum initiatives.
