A Multi-Tiered Approach to Green Meetings

Little by little, meeting by meeting, eco-friendly practices have been put in place by planners for Symantec, the technology company that helps consumers and organizations secure and manage their information. Some use china instead of disposable dishes; others donate leftover food. Gradually, such efforts are becoming more standardized among the company's more than 150 annual meetings.

"I don't think we've done anything super out of the ordinary," says Karen Zunkowski, director of marketing events at the company's Lindon, Utah, office. "But we've noticed that our sustainability efforts have melded with our philanthropic efforts. When we do something greener, we also end up helping the community. Leaving the destination better than when we came has been our underlying goal."

Those results have encouraged Symantec to go ever greener. The planning team is now discussing composting and considering more eco-friendly transportation options. "We don't have a general policy," says Zunkowski. "It's been one of those unwritten, understood things for our group. We are now documenting an internal checklist so we can be more in compliance with the industry." The plan, for now, is to become continually greener, in manageable increments.

That's a smart approach, industry sources agree. Small initial steps are easy to implement, and from there efforts can be intensified. Following is a look at how to jump into the greening process at any point, from elementary efforts to world-class examples in sustainability.

A Hint of Green
"Start with the low-hanging fruit, the easy wins," suggests Shawna McKinley, director of sustainability for MeetGreen, the independent planning firm whose principals, Amy Spatrisano, CMP, and Nancy Zavada, CMP, founded the Green Meetings Industry Council, an organization of suppliers and planners that hosts an annual conference offering education and best practices. These efforts can be informal, similar to Symantec's approach. "In 2007, we started hearing the green buzz," says David Hunt, vice president of global events for Symantec, whose team handles 50 to 60 events each year and is responsible for the company's most high-profile gatherings. "That's when we started wondering, what can we do? How can we minimize our footprint but still maintain a good experience for our attendees and make business sense?"

The company started with reducing water bottles, providing reusable ones alongside the expected plastic bottles. Within two years the bottled water was gone, and Symantec's planners now routinely work with their hotel partners to supply filtered water along with sustainable cups.

Notes McKinley, "These small efforts are going to save you money or are cost-neutral, and they don't cause any pain to attendees." Following are her suggestions for basic elements every meeting can -- and should -- implement.

• Provide water from coolers and pitchers.

• Provide recycling bins for cans and bottles.

• Post meeting materials online.

• Turn off lights in empty meeting rooms.

• Don't pre-plate or pre-pour F&B.

• Eliminate saucers for cups; use mugs instead.

• Collect and reuse name badges.

• Provide paper and pens in meeting rooms on request only.

• Change any one-time-use foamcore event signs to cardboard-based signs.

• Provide attendees with green travel tips before the event (see "Be Gentle, Travelers,").

• Provide a carbon-offset choice in the registration process.

Early Challenges 
One of the biggest hurdles can be getting the message out and making sure everyone -- from the CEO to the attendees  -- is willing to participate.

"Whenever I start with a new group, they're typically struggling getting buy-in," says McKinley. Getting executives to go without bottled water, for example, is still hard. When trying to win over those on the C-level who have trouble with change, talk their language, she suggests. Explain to them in detail how the new practices can deliver benefits for the company in cost-savings, improved efficiencies and a better image for the organization.

For attendees, demonstrate how sustainability will enhance the conference experience and their health. "Green can be fun," adds McKinley. "It can make you look good among your peers, it can be a game. It can be an expression of caring. It can be higher quality."

The Unitarian Universalist Association decided to go green in 2005 because caring for the earth is one of the organization's seven principles, a basic tenet held by its members. "I didn't have to try to get buy-in," says Janiece Sneegas, Ph.D., director of the General Assembly and conference services for the UUA in Boston, who works with MeetGreen to improve the sustainability of her events year by year. "But I was not excited about it when we began. I said, 'This is going to cost us money; this is going to cost us time.' We're able to look back now and say we have come a tremendously long way since 2005."

At the time, members of the UUA's Seventh Principle Project asked if Sneegas would just talk with MeetGreen's Amy Spatrisano to find out how the group could get started on the road to sustainability. "I was frank. I felt like we would fail and that we wouldn't be able to do enough," says Sneegas, who handles the UUA's annual General Assembly, which brought 3,600 people to Phoenix this past June. "She said, 'Jan, I'm never going to tell you that you're not doing enough or that you've done something wrong. All I ask is that you do what you can do and work from there.'" Spatrisano then came to a UUA conference in Long Beach, Calif., to do a baseline, "which essentially was nothing," and helped Sneegas get the program off the ground. The association has worked with MeetGreen since then to push the events ever greener.

Sneegas advises those just starting out to formalize the process. "Note in site selection and RFPs that you're interested in upping the green quotient," she says. "It should be in your contract. And everybody should join the GMIC."

Getting Greener
With basic measures in place, a little more effort can go a long way to improving sustainability, often with the enthusiastic support of suppliers.

As such practices are established, eco-friendly efforts can be formalized, beginning with the procurement process. Notes Symantec's David Hunt, "In our journey to sustainability, as we write our own standards, our next step would be to go to our procurement team and say that this needs to be in our contracts."

The more planners ask of suppliers, believes Hunt, the more the suppliers will step up, and green practices will become the norm for everyone. "We're not the only ones asking vendors what they're doing," he says. "There are many vendors who want to stand out, and it makes it easier for us to do business with those who are making the effort to be competitive."

When sustainability comes at an added cost, sponsors might be willing to step in. Soliciting donations -- such as high-quality, branded travel mugs at coffee breaks -- allows sponsors great exposure while also adding value for attendees.

"When you start to get more strategic, ask vendors what they already are doing and what they will do to take the next step," says McKinley. "For instance, the UUA really uses their negotiating power. One year, the general services contractor at a chosen facility hadn't started its own sustainability process. Jan Sneegas asked for a policy to be developed, that the policy cover procurement, and that they step up on-site recycling. Integrating that into the contract made a world of difference, and the supplier now has a tool to show other clients."

Sustainability needs should be part of the initial negotiating process, says Philadelphia-based hospitality attorney Joshua L. Grimes. And, agreements of this nature should be part of the contract. Grimes offers the following advice for organizations ready to take a more committed approach to green meetings.

• Create a written sustainability policy for your organization's daily operations, including its meetings. Elements should include recycling, energy savings, food donation, purchasing of products made from recycled materials, other buying criteria and acceptable means of travel.

• Ensure that your policy is comprehensive by conforming it to an established international protocol such as ISO 20121 (learn about the standard at bit.ly/S7ld7K; buy the official document for about $160 from bit.ly/PiSCts) or the Convention Industry Council's APEX/ASTM Standards for Green Meetings (learn about the standards at bit.ly/UojiMM; buy the official documents for $149 at bit.ly/UK7NhJ).

• Attach your sustainability policy to requests for proposal for hotels and other meeting services, so that bidders can respond to your requirements and confirm that they will meet your goals.

• Ask prospective suppliers to provide their own sustainability policies in their RFP responses.

• Check suppliers' sustainability track records: Request records of sustainability practices from other meetings, and check references from prior customers.

• Verify suppliers' memberships in green meeting and sustainability organizations. Don't count organizations that appear to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks.

• Verify that your insurance will cover volunteer projects, charitable food donation and other efforts.

• Incorporate your sustainability needs into a strategy for contract negotiations. This is when you have the most bargaining power and the best chance to have your needs met.

• Specify your sustainability needs in meeting contracts. Attach your green policy and include a provision incorporating the attached document as a contractual requirement.

• Include green-friendly damages clauses in your supplier contracts, with an appropriate remedy for a supplier's failure to meet sustainability objectives. Remedies might include requiring the supplier to purchase carbon offsets, to commit to reaching your sustainability goals at a specified later meeting, to sponsor a local CSR initiative, or to donate money or time to a sustainability advocacy organization.

• During meetings, require regular written reports on progress with respect to sustainability goals. Consider daily reporting of such, along with room pickup and master account charges.

• If a supplier is failing to meet agreed-upon sustainability goals during an event, document your concerns in writing as soon as possible so that compliance can be achieved to the extent possible.

• Follow up on compliance with green goals as part of a post-meeting report. If the supplier did not meet its sustainability commitments, assess damages and agree upon corrective actions as part of the settling of financial accounts.

Deepest Green
 Imagine the daunting challenge of planning a green gathering that would involve about 2,000 participants and 11 million tickets sold to spectators over about three weeks. Not only would the amount of potential waste be astronomical, but it would be broadcast, quite literally, the world over.

When London entered its bid to host this year's Olympic festivities with the International Organizing Committee, the proposal brought a promise: to hold the world's first sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games. And, at the time, global standards for living up to that promise still were in the early stages of development.

Even as plans were being solidified for the opening ceremonies, event experts and standards experts representing 30 countries, as well as Meeting Professionals International and UFI (the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry) were working to finalize an international set of green standards for event management teams, using a British standard, BS8901, as a starting point. On June 15, just in time for the Games, the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 20121, which helps event management teams identify economic, environmental and social issues surrounding the structure of their staffs and the way they do business, and by extension adding sustainability elements to their events.

Among those working on the standards was Phil Cumming, corporate sustainability manager for the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. With his help, the committee implemented ideas that the collaborators were suggesting for ISO 20121.

Fiona Pelham, managing director of Sustainable Events in Manchester, England, chaired the team that created the standards and saw the results when she attended Olympic events in August.

"As a visitor, I could see how it had been used," she says. "As soon as you walked in, you saw a significant amount of natural plantings, which involved a cleanup of the park and the river." Some species were chosen specifically to attract bees, and the landscaping of one of the parks makes it so about 500 homes in the area no longer are at risk for flooding.

"From a practical event side, you noticed the many recycling bins in the park and how they were color-coded, matching the catering materials that were used," Pelham adds.

Other ways the committee took sustainability to heart included using existing venues where possible, including Wimbledon, Excel, Lords and Earls Court. London's new Olympic Stadium, the Aquatics Center and the Velodrome were deemed necessary for the community, so permanent buildings were constructed; temporary venues went up in Greenwich Park, Hyde Park and Horse Guards Parade, where permanent structures weren't needed.

The organizers also created the London 2012 Active Travel program to encourage people across the United Kingdom to walk and cycle more often. More than 900,000 spectators took advantage of park-and-ride, shuttle buses, accessible services, and walking and cycling routes to the Games.

ISO 20121 can be applied to the vision, values, goals, and business/event plan objectives for organizations and their events, including those social, environmental and economic aspects. "When you start implementing 20121," says Pelham, "it's everything around how your business runs. You're talking about the competency of the people implementing the standard, whether they have the right skills to handle their jobs. If you start making decisions with the best sustainable business practices in mind, it becomes systemic."

To follow the Olympics' lead, here are some ways organizations can ratchet up their sustainability to be as green as possible at events:

• Arrange for the composting of food waste.

• Donate leftover meals to food banks, soup kitchens or farms. Don't worry that someone will claim they got sick from your extras: In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects anyone who donates food in good faith from criminal or civil liability.

• Create a transportation plan, encouraging attendees to share rides, take public transportation or use the fewest vehicles possible. Include a no-idle policy to reduce air pollution.  

• Arrange to donate extra meeting materials to schools.

• Add a community-service element to the agenda, taking attendees out of the meeting venue to serve food to the homeless, clean up a park, or work in some other way to help out in the chosen destination.

• Create a procurement policy that outlines consistent, clear sustainability criteria for all purchased items and services (food, registration materials, guest rooms, A/V, etc.).

• Integrate hybrid options for attendees who aren't able to travel to the event.

• Use evaluation forms to solicit audience feedback on the event's sustainability programs.

• Create a sustainable branding strategy to improve the life cycle of any logoed event items such as signs, banners, collateral, name badges, etc.

Documenting the Good 
Attaining the highest levels of sustainability practices means measuring the outcome of your efforts over the years and over planning cycles to be able to show the money and resources you're saving, and the positive impact of such efforts on your organization. This requires collecting reports on the results of the program from vendors, facilities and others involved in the meeting.

"Everybody is just getting their legs under them on this," says McKinley of MeetGreen. "Not all properties are ready for you to ask about your footprint. At the end of the process, though, you want to know if your efforts affected the amount of water you used or the energy you used. If you are not measuring the impact, you can't argue why it does or doesn't make sense."

Symantec has started this process by hiring an agency to determine what the company is saving during its Vision Europe event, a conference for 2,300 IT professionals that offers technical information, training and access to IT experts. "We've carved out a bit of the budget to hire the agency -- a tough thing to ask when budgets are so tight -- but if you want to create a benchmark, that is an option," says Zunkowski.

An example of a sustainability report comes from Meeting Professionals International; the report (available free at bit.ly/PmxGQN) looks at the World Education Congress held July 22-26, 2011, in Orlando. The organization collected the information using its own Sustainable Event Measurement Tool, available for free at bit.ly/PSX6cD  through Oct. 31 (starting Nov. 1, it will be free to planner members; nonmembers and suppliers will pay a nominal fee that is yet to be announced).

Among the details, the MPI sustainability report shows that the association recycled 60 percent of the waste from the convention center over the four days, or a total of 25.67 tons of nonhazardous waste (up from 5.65 tons diverted at the 2010 WEC). This included 21.85 tons of mixed plastic, glass, paper, metal and food waste, and 3.82 tons of cardboard.

Other factors covered by the 17-page report include:

• The group's CSR goals;

• A description of the event;

• Sourcing and product decisions;

• Community engagement choices;

• Online opportunities for people who couldn't attend;

• Sessions that addressed sustainability and corporate social responsibility;

• Ways MPI's sustainability practices were communicated to the constituency;

• Information on the sustainability practices in place at chosen venues;

• Details on how the sustainability efforts were measured, and

• MPI's sustainability policy.

Once gathered, this detailed information not only helps support the efforts of the meeting team, but also can be shared with marketing departments and meeting participants to celebrate your organization's green practices.

Notes Symantec's Hunt: "We want people to have those positive experiences with us. We're not trying to push a green agenda; we're trying to be a good corporate citizen."