As this issue of Meetings & Conventions heads to press, there is new urgency about the earth’s growing climate crisis: The venerable National Academy of Sciences has issued a report concluding that “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia,” adding, “Human activities are responsible for much of the recent global warming.”
Equally sobering is research from the Arlington, Va.-based Nature Conservancy, a respected environmental group even within conservative business circles. (In fact, President Bush recently tapped its board chairman, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to be his new Secretary of the Treasury.) According to the group, “Data indicating global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions are compelling and unassailable.”
Perhaps most om-inously, renowned scientist and author Stephen Hawking has made recent headlines by predicting that Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”
Does any of this sound beneficial to the future of the $107 billion meetings industry? Could environmental damage worldwide, manifested as pollution, higher temperatures, wilder weather, rising sea levels and costal erosion, actually threaten the very existence of meetings and events?
“People are avoiding the issue,” insists Steven Hacker, CAE, president of the International Association for Exhibition Management in Dallas. “We all think that the Gulf Coast is the place that needs special thinking and attention, but if it’s hurricane trouble that you need to avoid, you’d better eliminate anything along the East Coast, too, because it’s simply a matter of time before it gets whacked with something comparable to Hurricane Katrina.”
As the evidence for global warming and other environmental problems has mounted, meetings industry organizations have turned a spotlight on the impact of face-to-face events to help planners lessen any environmental damage attributable to their meetings. For example, in 2003 the Convention Industry Council formed its Green Meetings Task Force to create “minimum best practices” with input from planners, the Environmental Protection Agency, hotels, and convention and visitor bureaus. (A major result of this effort was CIC’s 2004 Green Meetings Report, available online at www.conventionindustry.org/projects/green_meetings_report.pdf).
Such efforts are of critical importance, since meeting planners are positioned to make choices and buying decisions that could lessen the negative environmental impact of their events.
In other words, this industry can help head off climate change, waste and pollution. Meeting and event planners choose hotels, off-site venues, transportation suppliers and destinations; as they increasingly think green, their buying power can shape the marketplace, encouraging suppliers to take environmental impact into consideration.
“When we go in to do business, the conversation we have with a venue is pretty specific,” says Kyle Schmit, show and production manager with Blaine, Minn.-based Aveda, an environmentally focused personal-care products company. “We try to be as sustainable as possible, but a lot of venues aren’t there yet. Hotels want to work with us, but if they don’t recycle, or allow guests to avoid daily cleaning of linens, or help us to avoid plastics, chances are we won’t be working with them. On the other hand, hotels know that if they get it right, they stay in our good graces -- and that matters. We do enough shows and events that hotels want us back.”
Other conscientious corporations and associations have adopted green meetings policies to guide their decision making. According to Portland, Ore.-based BlueGreen Meetings (www.bluegreenmeetings.org), such policies should aim to achieve the following goals.
* Decrease the amount of solid waste produced by the event;
* Reduce energy and water consumption at the event;
* Minimize or offset harmful emissions resulting from vehicular transportation and energy consumption associated with the event;
* Dispose of waste in an environmentally responsible manner; and
* Eliminate the use of harmful chemicals at or for the event.
Supplier support
Meanwhile, suppliers to the meetings industry increasingly are willing to make environmental-mindedness a selling point. Recent years have seen a flowering of initiatives: Restaurants, hotel F&B outlets and caterers are using more locally grown food items, which require less energy to transport, and organic ingredients that have not been treated with chemical pesticides or herbicides. Convention centers are recycling materials, eschewing disposable cups and plates, and reusing “gray water,” the ecocentric term for waste water. A growing number of new venues everywhere are being certified for their energy efficiency.
“Meeting planners have a lot of influence with their purchasing power to try to reward good actors by giving them business and hopefully reaping the rewards,” says Josh Knights, director of corporate partnerships with the Nature Conservancy.
“There is a lot that the meetings industry and business travelers can do,” adds Knights. “I’ve seen a lot of great improvement in my travels in terms of new efficient light bulbs in guest rooms and the little card about towels and getting your bed made. Some people get cynical about not washing hotel towels, but you help save some energy. And, come on, do you really need your sheets changed every night?”
More hotels are minding Mother Earth in terms of their construction as well as operations. As just one example, Marriott International has signed onto the Environmental Protection Agency’s group of “Carbon Leaders,” companies volunteering to cut their emission of heat-trapping gases. Marriott’s 2,600-plus properties in the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent per available room between 2004 to 2010.
Other earth-friendly initiatives at the hotel brand include water and energy conservation, clean air programs, efforts at respecting and preserving wildlife, and “reduce-recycle-reuse” waste management.
It makes fiscal sense, too. A 2006 study by London-based consultants HVS International, titled Sustainable Hotel Business Practices, points out that the hospitality industry gains savings though cost-reduction measures and benefits from greater financial stability via reductions in waste and energy consumption. Furthermore, notes HVS International, “positive PR created by marketing, recognition and awards can increase demand or even make new markets available to hotels. One potential future market may be the very one that demands sustainable practices in a vocal way.”
That future market is fast developing. Already, event organizers can find green venues in most major U.S. cities. Since 1995, Washington, D.C.-based Green Seal (a nonprofit group ensuring that products meet specific environmental standards) has run a “Greening the Lodging Industry Program” -- a list of certified hotels is at www.greenseal.org/programs/lodging_properties.cfm. Similarly, the Green Hotel Initiative is a program by Ceres, a network of environmental and public-interest groups, “designed to increase and demonstrate market demand for environmentally responsible hotel services.”
Further, a growing plethora of varied resources is helping planners to lessen their events’ contribution to the climate crisis. For example, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has set up a Green Meetings website loaded with helpful tips, tools, links and other valuable information, at www.epa.gov/oppt/greenmeetings.
Committed cities
Beyond the hotel industry, entire North American cities and even whole regions (think Canada and the Pacific Northwest) have discovered the benefits of selling themselves to groups as green destinations. “Portland has always been green,” says Michael Smith, vice president of sales with the Portland Oregon Visitors Association. “We were one of the first cities with a recycling effort. Our hotels are hopping onboard by getting Green Seals for the programs they’re involved in. So we can offer blocks of rooms certified as Green Sealed. For planners that are heavily involved in green, that’s a great selling point.”
But how does one travel to these green destinations and hotels without damaging the environment? “If you want to get halfway around the world, you have to take a plane,” concedes Josh Knights of the Nature Conservancy, “and plane travel is a major contributor to harmful emissions.”
Indeed, jet travel alone consumes huge amounts of carbon-based energy and represents the primary source of the meetings industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But coming to the rescue are so-called carbon-offset programs, whereby contributions are made by a company or group to projects that lessen the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thereby mitigating (or offsetting) the harmful environmental impact of the company’s or group’s travel.
According to the London-based Carbon Neutral Co., a firm that facilitates the offset process, 20 attendees taking a one-way flight between New York City and Los Angeles would be responsible for adding 8.8 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Yet the company responsible for those attendees could cut the impact of their business travel to nothing. For instance, the company could contribute $112.37 to support a forestry project, sufficient to “soak up” the equivalent of the flight’s emissions, thus making the flight carbon-neutral.
Even fuel-guzzling planes are becoming a bit more earth-friendly. For instance, Boeing’s new 787 is made of lighter composite materials and will burn 20 percent less fuel than conventional jets of a similar size.
Going forwardIf the U.S.-based meetings industry has taken steps toward environmental responsibility, they are baby steps. “When I go to some outside events, I see vinyl banners and plastic bottles that are meant to be disposed,” says Aveda’s Schmit. “It’s not green at all, because it’s going to be in a landfill for the next 500,000 years. It’s horrible for the planet.”
Despite this slow pace of change, new industry initiatives are springing up in response to the environmental challenges faced by the meeting planning community. In January of 2004, the Green Meeting Industry Council (www.greenmeetings.info) was formed to provide planners with education, resources and certification opportunities. The group, which is supported by CVBs in green-minded destinations such as Portland, Ore.; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, B.C., hopes to eradicate “brown meetings” -- that is, meetings that fail to take their environmental impact into account -- by 2020.
Another organization, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Conventions (www.cerc04.org), began by greening the 2004 national political conventions in both Boston and New York City. CERC’s projects at these high-profile events included use of renewable energy, carbon offsets and green hotel programs, as well as food and construction waste management.
Moreover, long-established meetings organizations have embraced the environmental cause: For example, the Professional Convention Management Association’s new edition of the basic industry reference manual, Professional Meeting Management, includes a new section on planning green meetings.
Of course, change also is taking place at the grass roots of the meetings industry, among planners themselves.
“Now, there are corporate meeting planners and some third-party planners who have started to embrace environmental management strategies,” according to Tedd Saunders, co-owner of the Boston-based Saunders Hotel Group and a longtime champion of the green meetings movement. “They have seen that there’s an opportunity, a very simple process, where just by asking their providers to be more environmentally responsible, they can help protect our environment.”
Natural Choices
Sustainable Savings
Brands Take a Stand