The meetings industry is on the cusp of having explicit standards for organizing green events. The documentation will be available by the end of the year in the form of the APEX/ASTM Standard Specifications for Environmentally Sustainable Meetings, Events, Trade Shows and Conferences.
Undertaken by the Alexandria, Va.-based Convention Industry Council as part of its Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) initiative, the project to create the standards began in October 2007, headed up by Amy Spatrisano, principal of Portland, Ore.-based MeetGreen and a founder of the Green Meetings Industry Council, and Sue Tinnish, an Arlington Heights, Ill.-based facilitator and industry consultant.
In July 2008, as the process became more involved, the committee began working with ASTM International, a voluntary standards-development organization. Through each stage, members of the ASTM community have read and voted on the evolving document, including people unfamiliar with the meetings industry. Spatrisano was hoping to submit the standards for the final balloting process at the end of September.
"There have been some philosophical disagreements," notes Spatrisano, "such as how you determine what ‘recycled' means, as in whether a recycled item contains preconsumed products or just postconsumed. That's one of the issues we are tied up in."
The format The standards will be the most technical document ever created for the industry, prescribing how to lessen the effect of all types of meetings on the environment.
The information covers nine sectors with requirements for both planners and suppliers: accommodations, audiovisual and production, communications and marketing, destinations, exhibits, F&B, meeting venues, on-site offices and transportation. Those nine sectors are further broken into eight categories each, including staff management/policy and procurement. Within those eight categories, planners and suppliers are offered four levels of compliance, from the bare bones of creating an organizational policy to the elegance of a zero-waste meeting with the full cooperation of all parties involved.
In the early iterations, each of the nine sectors ran to about 80 pages. The current form has been pared down to about 30 pages each.
"For the standards to be the precise documents they have to be, a certain density is necessary," says Lawrence Leonard, CMP, who serves as APEX director for the CIC. One tip Leonard gives for reading and understanding the standards: "Shall" is mandatory; "should" is optional.
A peek inside What follows is some sample language from the draft standards. Spatrisano, who shared this information with M&C, emphasizes that the details might vary in the finalized version.
•
To achieve level-one compliance in all sectors, suppliers and planners
must have a formal written sustainability policy for their
organizations.
• In the F&B sector, the largest category is
procurement, which includes where food is produced and acquired. To
achieve level-one compliance, according to the draft, "for on-site
events the supplier shall purchase a minimum of 100 percent of coffee
which meets one or more of the following: organic, fair-trade and/or
shade-grown." Concurrent with that, "the planner shall require in their
contract or agreement that all coffee for on-site and off-site events is
organic, fair-trade and/or shade-grown."
• Under waste
management, level one, "the supplier shall conduct waste audits
semiannually to identify waste streams and develop a plan for waste
reduction and increased diversion." For their part, planners "shall have
waste reduction practices in place that assist the supplier in reducing
the amount of waste created and increasing the amount of waste
diverted."
The dissemination In July,
at Meeting Professionals International's World Education Congress in
Vancouver, B.C., Spatrisano and Tamara Kennedy-Hill, CMP, executive
director of the GMIC, were among the speakers for an all-day session
based on the draft standards. One goal was to get an idea of where
meeting professionals stood in their sustainability efforts, to help
determine how the standards could be implemented. Most session
attendees, who paid an extra fee and had a vested interested in
learning, were at level zero. Indeed, Kennedy-Hill says most planners
need pretraining on how to create a sustainability action plan.
One
corporate planner who was in the session felt a little overwhelmed. "It
was a lot," she recalls, adding that she feels the standards as
described would be better used with large-scale events and conferences
instead of the myriad last-minute small meetings she works on.
For
instance, to reach level-one compliance, sustainability requirements
must be part of the request for proposal. "But nine times out of 10, I
don't send out an RFP," notes the planner.
Those involved in
creating the standards recognize that there will be a heavy learning
curve when the documents are published. "We don't expect everyone to
start using them overnight," says Kennedy-Hill. In the meantime, the
GMIC is developing training programs to familiarize industry
professionals with the documents, and the CIC is creating a
certification program, which could be available by fall 2011.
Amanda
Gourgue, CMP, is an independent planner and a Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design-accredited professional who hopes to be one of
those trainers. She was at the MPI session in Vancouver and has been
voicing her opinion on the standards during the ASTM review process. To
planners who worry that the greening of a meeting is just too hard,
Gourgue says, "You don't have to go to level 4. Be proud of where you
are and what you can do, and use the standard to improve in the future."
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