Whether you’re hosting a massive event or just throwing a party, making it a sustainable gathering does a lot these days to make your guests feel good about attending.
And it’s good business, too!
With sustainability being such a huge issue now, focusing on sustainability helps improve the brand image, leading to more loyal customers, reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing ROI. Plus, guests are more likely to share the event’s sustainability initiatives on social media, garnering grassroots social media exposure and leveraging viral marketing to foster brand recognition.
Remember, Forbes found that 88% of consumers want brands to help them be more environmentally friendly, so positioning your business as one of those environment-forward brands by hosting a sustainable, carbon neutral event, is an excellent marketing strategy.
But there’s so much to consider when planning an event, and the conventional methods are all unsustainable, so it takes some extra effort to make an event carbon neutral. So let’s cover some of the many factors event planners have to consider, and strategies for streamlining event sustainability:
1. Be Smart About Waste
Events produce tons of waste every year. Guests are usually given bountiful, cheap, disposable items, which they use once (or never) and then throw into the landfill.
So, aim for zero disposables. Especially plastic. No disposable plastic cutlery, cups, clamshells, plates, straws, etc. Even if you set up recycling stations, most plastic waste is non-recyclable anyway!
Disposables made from paper or wood are a better alternative, but any kind of disposable is fundamentally needless waste. It’s better to provide reusable plates, straws, cutlery, and cups (branded with your event logo, naturally).
Encourage guests to bring their own containers, or try giving (or selling) reusable cups and straws, and serving draught drinks (beer, juice, kombucha, water, wine, sangria, Man Paw, etc.) so people never throw away their cup. (Plus, after the event, that cup will stay at their house all year and remind them to buy a ticket for next year’s event!)
The plates and cups don’t need to be XXL. Providing smaller plates and cups helps avoid excessive food waste.
Ideally, a green event only needs composting bins (and maybe metal recycling) to deal with any disposable items the event gives to the guests.
2. Find a Sustainable Venue
If you’ll be indoors, try to find a LEED-Certified building, so your guests can be comfortable while using minimal energy for heating and cooling. Plus, you’ll know the venue has good water conservation practices, and likely even a renewable electricity source.
3. Conserve water
Avoid over-hydrating your guests. It may seem fancy to have a carafe of cucumber-mint-lemon-strawberry water on every table, but try having a water refill-station instead, so guests can control their hydration themselves.
Make an announcement to your guests about taking shorter showers and skipping unnecessary laundry washes, to avoid taking more water than needed from the locals. This can help avoid a problem like in Hawai’i where many locals have had to ration their water use because the tourists at the big hotels use too much.
4. Use tech to replace as many physical items as possible
There are countless ways to go digital, which usually saves the event time and money.
Are you still giving out maps to your guests?
Have them download an app instead.
Still using paper sign-in sheets?
There’s an app for that.
Have a pamphlet to pass out to your guests?
Make it digital!
Instead of name tags, participants can make a profile for themselves in your app. Allow guests to add each other as friends, form sub-groups, and send private messages. You’ll create your own mini social network!
Give guests a digital swag bag instead of cheap trinkets shipped from China, and fill it with digital goodies (discount codes, eBooks, eTickets, etc.), services (massages, professional photographs, spa days, bar discount, etc.), or treats (free local delicacy, free ice cream, restaurant discount, etc.).
Even team building games, like scavenger hunts, can be made 100% digital.
These are simple solutions that end up saving events thousands of dollars while making them seem more modern, green, and providing useful data for future events.
5. Choose Clean Green Food
Find food and drinks that are
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local
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organic
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seasonal
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fair-trade
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mostly plant-based
It sounds like a lot, but it’s not very difficult to find food and drinks that are sustainable these days. And your guests will appreciate it so much.
Minimize food packaging as well. Your guests actually don’t want each finger sandwich to be individually wrapped in plastic film.
Finding a sustainable caterer is probably the easiest solution. Finding a sustainable catering service will likely be fairly easy, so then you can ask them to recommend other local sustainable businesses they work with for decoration, security, entertainment, tech, etc.
6. Find Renewable Electricity
If you chose a LEED-Certified venue, then it probably sources its power from renewable energy, like wind or nuclear, or it has its own solar panels.
If that’s not possible, try bringing in your own solar power.
Or set up fun fitness stations where your guests can charge battery banks or run equipment by riding a stationary bike.
You’ll still want to reduce your electricity consumption as much as possible, so take advantage of natural light as much as possible,and LEDs when you need to.
7. Find an Accessible Location
Help guests find low-carbon transportation, such as providing bike vouchers for local city bike programs, public transit passes, or carpooling coordination.
Allow guests to attend virtually as well, to bring those transportation costs down to zero.
8. But the biggest impact…
It’s estimated that about 70% of an event’s carbon footprint comes from…
Air travel.
When your guests fly in for your event, they are responsible for immense amounts of CO₂ (well, really the airlines are responsible for not finding clean alternatives to petrol-based jet fuel decades ago, but still). So what can you do about that?
That’s why we collaborated with SIG to offer carbon offsets to their guests to make their attendance carbon-neutral! You can either pay to offset your guests’ flights as a swag bag gift, or encourage them to offset their flights with our flight footprint calculator. Contact us at TheCarbonOffsetCompany.org to find the best carbon offset strategy for your event.
Bonus Strategy!
9. Offset the rest of the event
After improving your sustainability as much as possible, estimate how much CO₂ your event is still producing, and buy carbon offsets to offset the emissions you can’t avoid.
Then announce that your event is carbon neutral to wild applause.
Then talk about it.
Tell everyone about all the sustainability initiatives at the event. It gets people excited, it gets them telling their friends, it makes your guests feel good about going before they even arrive. It makes them more likely to sign up again and again.
Going green is probably the hottest business strategy right now. And with currently shifting cultural attitudes, soon the public won’t accept anything that isn’t fully sustainable. So get out ahead of the crowd now and make your event tech-savvy, modern, and carbon neutral.
What other strategies can you think of to make an event sustainable?
