Go Green Easily With Ecologically Safe Programs
An easy way to plan green meetings is to choose a venue with its own inbuilt green program. Fairmont’s Eco-Meet program helps planners organize sustainable meetings through four key areas — accommodations, cuisine, service and programming — through measures such as zero-waste operations, “100 km” local-ingredient-based menus and hotel-provided iPads stocked with customized event apps.
The Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group has embraced green practices since 1994 and has included brandwide policies through its 50-point EarthCare program since 2005. This spring, it became the first chain to have all its properties listed in TripAdvisor’s GreenLeaders program. In addition to in-hotel practices, Kimpton has even gone so far as to green its sales process. “Now we use a sales app,” said Edward Mendoza, director of sales and marketing for Kimpton’s Alexandria, Virginia, hotels. “In the old days, we used to have big, printed sales kits that we used to lug around, but now all of the sales managers go out with iPads.”
Choosing a convention center or a hotel with LEED certification is another easy way to ensure that your event venue is built to save on energy and waste costs and features a staff that will help you incorporate sustainable initiatives into your event. The U.S. Green Building Council, which created the certification process, maintains a directory of certified buildings online.
Do-It-Yourself Sustainability and Savings
While many of the biggest ways to save by greening your meeting need to be built into the venue, such as on-site energy production facilities or LED signage, there are many areas where planners can rack up savings that add up to a lot at the end of the event.
Food-and-beverage is one of the easiest areas to make requests of venues that don’t have inbuilt green programs. Use water stations rather than bottled water, use linen and china rather than paper napkins and plates, have coffee and tea stations replaced as needed rather than hourly, and request composting and recycling bins for your food service areas rather than just trash cans.
Reducing printed materials is an easy way to green your meeting while saving money, but for small meetings without the internal facilities to create their own event apps, this can seem like an additional budget item rather than a point of savings. Thankfully, many convention centers and CVBs have now created apps for their area that they customize free of charge for incoming groups, and Web start-ups like Sched make it easy even for small shops to take their events online quickly.
Green programs in meeting venues have also long come at the request of clients.
“In November of 2006, VBCC was challenged by one of our first clients, the North American Association for Environmental Education, to implement a recycling program,” said Dobbins. “We quickly realized we had the necessary equipment in place and [began] single stream recycling of paper, cardboard, plastic and glass bottles, and steel and aluminum cans.”
So if you want to explore going green with your meeting and don’t see a prelisted slate of green features, just ask what’s possible. You might be able to not only help the environment and your own meeting budget, but set a path for others to do the same as well.
