How Two Major Meetings Reimagined Sustainability

Author: Michelle Russell

Attendees volunteered in the Sustainability Hub at Greenbuild in Philadelphia.

“If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future,” said one of the foremost world leaders on building a circular economy, Ellen MacArthur — an accomplished English sailor who learned those principles firsthand while navigating the world’s oceans. “When you sail on a boat,” she wrote, “you take with you the minimum of resources. You don’t waste anything. On land, we take what we want.”

Meaning, in our “take, make, waste,” economy, natural resources are taken from the ground, products are made with a singular, limited shelf life, and then disposed of in landfills.

Business events have long been designed with this one-off/single-use mentality. How can we adopt more of a reduce, reuse, recycle approach? Convene spoke with the organizers of two annual global events — Greenbuild International Conference & Expo and the World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF), whose audiences are dedicated to moving the circular economy forward — to learn how they reflect their stakeholders’ life’s work while also serving to inspire them. Plus: We explore why we need to rethink swag and reclaim trash.

Greenbuild International Conference & Expo, organized by the U.S. Green Building Council, welcomed 23,000 attendees and 750 exhibitors last November in Philadelphia.

Choosing the Host Venue

It all starts with choosing the right venue. “A lot of times when we are deciding which building we’re going to go to, we have these conversations upfront about what’s going to be expected, if they can fulfill it,” said Katie Gilham, event director, Greenbuild International Conference & Expo. “Some venues say — which I very much appreciate — ‘We’re not there yet,’” when it comes to meeting Greenbuild’s standards for managing waste and F&B, she said.

“We look for buildings that already have an EIC platinum designation or a LEED designation because we know that they can do a lot of the logistics behind it. We’re so reliant on the partners who work in the building to get us to these really big goals that we have, in making sure that we’re diverting at least 80 percent of our waste, and then, getting us to carbon neutral as well.”

Tuula Sjöstedt, who serves as communications and public affairs lead of international programs for WCEF’s parent organization Sitra, said the forum likewise depends on venue partners to accomplish its goals, requiring proof from those under consideration that they follow sustainable practices, “be it with food, with energy, with how they deal with their waste and water management.”

Attendees volunteered in the Sustainability Hub at Greenbuild Philly to build fresh food boxes for local nonprofits.

Greenbuild attendees volunteered to build fresh food boxes for local nonprofits.

Reducing Travel’s Carbon Cost

In addition to ensuring the venue meets WCEF’s sustainability standards, an important consideration is its accessibility — can you get there via public transport? Is it walkable to hotels? “If you have a venue that is not quite as compact as those where everything is in one place,” Sjöstedt said, “if people need to shift from place to place, we guide them and provide them with means of transportation that aren’t that carbon intense — like if you can use rental bikes.”

Part of the mindset shift to circular thinking, Sjöstedt said, is “to make people aware that these kinds of things can be purchased as a service; it doesn’t always have to be something that you own and have, because that’s one of the things about circularity to try to guide people into thinking: ‘I can be free from ownership. I don’t need to have that burden. I can have a variety of selections to pick from depending on when and what I need.’”

WCEF compensates or offsets the carbon foot-print of all its speakers’ travel “and we encourage other participants to do so on their part as well,”Sjöstedt said. “Also, when we’re informing people of how to come to the forum, we bring up alternatives.” For instance, at last year’s event, registrants were guided that “if they can come by land, there are nice train routes leading to Brussels from everywhere in Europe,” she said, “and we managed to encourage many people to do so.”

That travel recommendation became part of the WCEF experience — participants who came by train used social media to organize informal meetups with others attending the forum, using the travel time to engage with them at different stops along the way, Sjöstedt said.

Building Greener Booths

Greenbuild has extensive requirements for exhibitors’ booths that cover everything from their energy use to booth materials to furniture and equipment, which must be reused, rented, or donated after the show, for example. Called GMEGG, the Greenbuild Mandatory Exhibitor Greening Guidelines can be accessed here. In order to ensure compliance, Greenbuild offers exhibitors training, also available for reference here.

Carpeting’s Heavy Cost

According to a 2022 SISO research report, the area with the highest potential contribution to B2B trade-show waste in North America (from booth materials) is carpeting. WCEF uses only reusable carpet tiles in the expo area, whereas Greenbuild eschews carpeting entirely — something that is communicated to stakeholders. “You have to talk about it because if you are going to another event that has carpeted aisles and it looks nice and pristine, and then you come to Greenbuild and you see the [bare] floor,”Gilham said, and it doesn’t look as attractive. Gilham said the message is conveyed that it’s a sustainability — not a budgetary — decision.

A young white woman and a young Black woman in a headscarf talk at at table at the WCEF Forum in Brussels, Belgium.

The World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF) was held last April in Brussels, Belgium, where 1,531 in-person attendees and 9,800 online attendees from 168 countries participated, along with 22 international partners and 42 expo stand hosts.

Shifting Mindsets Around F&B

“At WCEF,” Sjöstedt said, “we only offer vegetarian food, and preferably vegan. When we met in Rwanda in Africa, [we recognized] it is a culture where meat is a very basic ingredient on their plate, but still we wanted to get their mindset shifted to ‘it doesn’t have to be the way that it’s always been done’ — and it can even be a nice surprise for the audience. Our African counterparts had an assumption that people wouldn’t be happy to get meals served that didn’t have any meat,” but, she added, there ended up being very little negative feedback.

“It’s about teaching people to rethink how things are done,” Sjöstedt said. “And I think we’re a lot further in that thinking when it comes to vegan or vegetarian menus, compared to five to 10 years ago, when you may have just gotten a salad and beans on your plate.”

Greenbuild offers a box lunch and two plated lunches, as well as an off-site meal during the event and works with consultancy Honeycomb Strategies on F&B as well as other sustainability initiatives. “We have a higher percentage of vegan and vegetarian than probably most shows,” Gilham said, “and we don’t do any red meat at all. We also prefer that the majority of the food is sourced within 50 miles of the venue,” when possible.

Whatever leftover food from the boxed lunches that can’t be donated is either recycled or composted — “we want to make sure that nothing in that lunch goes into the landfill,” Gilham said. More than 200 on-site volunteers are stationed at containers to help attendees sort waste, she said, “to make sure it goes to the right stream.”

At both events, attendees are encouraged to bring their own reusable water bottles to use at water refilling stations.

WCEF hosted delegates from around the world.

Signage Solutions

Gilham said Greenbuild works with Freeman on making its signage digital, although some signs needed to be printed last year. “What we try to do, especially with hanging banners,” she said, is reuse them for three years, listing Greenbuild’s locations and dates over a three-year period.

But that circular approach has some drawbacks,including when accounting for carbon emissions associated with storing signage. “We are now working with Freeman on creating new signage every year — some hanging signage or the meterboards — on a different material that is 100-percent compostable/recyclable,” Gilham said. “None of it ends up in a landfill and it allows our event to be a little more agile in what we’re actually going to rig up or design, year in, year out. When you try to keep the signage for three years, you box yourself in and you can’t be as fluid in what your exhibit hall might look like.”

Working With Exhibitors

No printed materials or swag are given out by exhibitors at Greenbuild. “We do not allow tchotchkes on the show floor,” Gilham said. “This is what we tell our exhibitors: They are going to talk to this group of attendees who are working every day towards a zero-waste, net-zero carbon world, and they do not want to see it.” Instead, Gilham said, “We do a passport-to-prizes program, where you get a stamp if you go to all of the exhibitors and then there’s a drawing for something, like a digital gift card. We hope they move their budget from tchotchkes to something more meaningful.” There’s no printing on site, either. “Everything is in the app. There’s a digital show bag on there for our exhibitors” where they can upload information and collateral, she said.

“Getting to a zero-waste event is challenging — it takes every single one of our exhibitors helping us to get there.”There’s also a no-paper policy in WCEF’s expo area, where “different types of organizations present their circular economy work,” Sjöstedt said.“We don’t want people to bring future waste to the forum. We know that when you go to conferences and get a bag and fill it up with all kinds of brochures, many times they end up in the hotel room bin — so much for leaving a mark. So, we encourage everybody to make all their materials available by scanning a QR code on presentations on the screen at their stand, so people can very easily pick the pieces that they want to get acquainted with once the forum is over.”

From Logistics to Solutions

Both events seek to attract multidisciplinary audiences, because the transition to a circular economy requires collaboration and different ways of thinking.

WCEF has “always been an invitation-only event, but as the shift to a circular economy needs to be done quickly and we need everyone on board, we’ve made it available online free of charge — so anyone can join the forum online,” Sjöstedt said. “Accessibility is always an important part of sustainability and that can be interpreted on so many levels. We want to have a very diverse audience present at the forum. That means that some are very much hands-on and knee-deep already in the circular economy, and some have just heard of it. But what brings them together is that they all want to work together on building the circular economy for our future.”

WCEF targets to have one-third of participants come from business, “because businesses are leading the change and we can’t change the world by doing business as usual,” she said. “We have maybe about one-quarter from public sector,from officials, ministries. Then we have research institutes, NGOs, investors and finance, think tanks, media — many different types of organizations. We aim for a certain percentage from each sector and have been reaching those targets rather well.

“We bring people from different trades, different levels of society, and we mix and match them. With our networking tools, people can organize one-to-one meetings with each other, and exchange business cards via the app,” Sjöstedt said. “We want to have a big family and get new people to join from all over the world.”

Greenbuild seeks to bring in “as many professionals as possible” from different industry sectors, Gilham said. “It’s not just architects and engineers and lead consultants anymore, it’s sustainability managers, it’s building owners, it’s developers, it’s the private-equity firms that are creating the buildings and making sure that there’s buy-in at every level — including the people who are actually operating the building day in, day out. It’s making sure that we’re hitting a broad swath — this industry has been fairly niche for awhile and now we’re getting it to the masses and making it where all of this is standard in policy and in practice.”

To make that happen, session proposals are vetted and voted on by a working group that “has the swath of every attendee base, so that there’s somebody with that voice of the landscape architect, the engineer, the contractor, or the building owner — they’re all talking together about what the actual makeup of this program is going to be, in order to attract the attendees,” Gilham said. “Greenbuild is where people from the entire lifecycle of the building are going to come together, and we want to make sure that everyone has a seat at that table.”

What Is the Circular Economy?

The circular economic model is deeply rooted in the understanding that our old linear system is not working — we can see it in climate change and other global issues. The circular economy can be considered a tool for systemic change to transform to a sustainable and regenerative way of living and a global economic model that progressively decouples economic growth and development from consumption and finite resources. Click the links below and read on for some practical tips and inspiration.

Earn CMP Credit

Earn one clock hour of certification by visiting pcma.org/convene-cmp-series to answer questions about the articles in this cover story package. The Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) is a registered trademark of the Events Industry Council.

Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.