As an event planner, you've already got a lot of tasks on your to-do list. However, planning sustainable events does not only protect the planet, but it can also make your events easier to manage overall.
From reducing paper waste to recycling food containers to reusing items from past events, you can easily make your event more sustainable and better for the planet.
In this article, we’ll discuss some best practices for planning sustainable events while keeping your event goals real and attainable.
8 Best Practices for Sustainable Events
- Assess Your Event's Impact
- Create Eco-Friendly Invitations and Marketing Materials
- Select an Eco-Friendly Venue
- Sell Eco-Friendly Event Merchandise
- Look for Zero-Waste Event Vendors
- Make Recycling Part of Your Event
- Utilize LED Lighting Options
- Make Important Documents Available on Your Event App
What Are Sustainable Events?
Let's start with what's involved in hosting sustainable events and how they can impact both the event and the planet. Sustainable events are planned using sustainable actions, materials, and cleanup to tread more softly on the earth.
But why are sustainable events important?
Events can have a significant impact on the environment. Travel to and from events is responsible for between 70-90% of the event's carbon impact and an average attendee at a national conference generates 1.89 kg of waste per day.
Planning a sustainable event reduces your impact on the environment while boosting your brand’s reputation as an environmental steward. Following these best practices are some of the simplest and most effective ways to get started:
8 Best Practices for Sustainable Events
1. Assess Your Event's Impact
Assessing your event's environmental impact can seem difficult, but it really isn't. In fact, your whole event team can contribute to this task. For example:
- If you have one person handling food, have them estimate the amount of waste produced per person each day.
- For waste handling, consider how much waste will generally be produced by attendees.
- The individual handling vendors can determine how much waste their vendors are likely to produce.
Evaluate other areas as well, including your venue, invitations, marketing, event merchandise, recycling programs, and lighting to help reduce impact.
2. Create Eco-Friendly Invitations and Marketing Materials
How much mail do you throw away regularly? Some invitees may read and then dispose of your event’s invitations, adding to the problems with our landfills.
With this in mind, ensure that your event collateral is either recyclable, compostable, or both. If you can, try to focus your advertising and marketing on digital channels rather than print, since they minimize the resources you need to produce, send, and share.
For many situations, handling your nonprofit’s content and marketing digitally can dramatically reduce the waste from your event.
3. Select an Eco-Friendly Venue
Hosting your event at an environmentally friendly location can go a long way toward sustainability, but how do you select one?
One of the easiest ways is by selecting a LEED-certified venue or one certified by a similar program, such as ISO 14001, Green Key, or Green Seal, which are designed to use fewer resources while remaining more environmentally friendly.
When considering venues, ask questions about how they handle recycling and waste management. Plus, consider how close the venue is to public or mass transportation to reduce carbon impact.
4. Sell Eco-Friendly Event Merchandise
When you begin the process of sourcing event merchandise, consider using sustainable suppliers and materials for those items. Clothing can come from recycled or environmentally friendly sources.
Avoid single-use items that the attendees won't keep. Reusable branded shopping bags are great for holding event swag and keeping your brand awareness going long after the event. Consider compostable items or items that are designed to be reused or recycled to provide a much longer and more earth-friendly lifespan than traditional event merchandise.
5. Look for Zero-Waste Event Vendors
As you search for vendors to handle your event, from catering and ticketing to waste removal and portable toilets, try to partner with vendors that take a more sustainable approach to their business operations. To make this easier, you can have potential vendors explain their sustainable practices as part of your RFP process.
Reduce the overall impact of your event by focusing on vendors that:
- Add zero or low waste
- Use recycling
- Reuse items
- Implement practices to offset their carbon use
Similarly, vendors who rent rather than buy and discard items for events can help reduce the impact your event has on the environment.
6. Make Recycling Part of Your Event
Recycling does a great job of reducing your event's impact, but it’s important to plan how you’ll incorporate it into your event from the beginning. Start by working with recycling companies to determine what can be recycled using their services.
Contact vendors and ask that they use recyclable or compostable items in their swag and handouts to help promote sustainability.
Set up recycling bins around the event with signage that encourages recycling. Finally, include recycling as part of your post-event cleanup strategy.
7. Utilize LED Lighting Options
When you need to provide some of your own lighting for your event, focus on LED lighting options. This type of lighting uses significantly less energy than other types of lighting that are easily available commercially. In fact, they can often be operated using solar power due to their low power consumption.
Additionally, check if your venue takes advantage of any daylight in the form of windows, skylights, glass walls, or other light sources that can reduce your lighting demand during the daytime.
8. Make Important Documents Available on Your Event App
Though you'll probably need to have a few printouts available for those who are not as tech-savvy, try to have all of your important documents available on your event app, such as:
- Agendas
- Speaker bios
- Programs
- Maps
- Menus
- Location details
- Transportation options
By having event collateral available electronically, your attendees can focus on the event rather than needing to track down another copy of your schedule because they keep setting it down somewhere.
With over eight billion people on our planet, sustainable events are no longer an option, but a necessity. Managing a sustainable event can seem like a difficult process, but it actually goes quite smoothly with the right preparation.
At the same time, sustainable events help build your brand by showcasing your focus on environmental stewardship. Before your next event, take the time to carefully consider all aspects and work proactively to ensure that your event will have a lower impact on the planet and its people.
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