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In Summer 2023, after working more than 40 years at BPA Worldwide, the last 23 of which as president and CEO, Glenn Hansen launched his own venture, Reduce 2. Before retiring from independent auditing company BPA, he managed its iCompli Sustainability and Event Audit services, so his new company — a sustainability assurance practice focused on standards writing and carbon footprint calculating, certifying companies and events to industry and international standards — was a natural next step.
The launch of Reduce 2 — so named to reflect the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius — was also well-timed. “The pandemic served to make sustainability more of an imperative for events,” Hansen told Convene. “During COVID, people tried virtual trade shows and organizers saw revenue streams rapidly disappearing if that became the way of business going forward. I think there has been a major acceleration of social responsibility, which includes sustainability,” he said, to reduce the environmental impact of face-to-face events.
The Experiential Designers and Producers Association (EDPA) and Exhibition Services and Contractors Association (ESCA) retained Reduce 2 to write sustainability standards for each of their organizations, and then Hansen began working with Maritz on carbon footprint calculations for its clients, including Toyota, Destinations International, video game company Electronic Arts, and Amazon, which holds a several-day event for about 5,000 of its resellers.
Rachael Riggs
“Maritz had a vision coming out of the pandemic to measure the environmental impact of events. We recognized that you can’t reduce what you don’t measure,” Rachael Riggs, Maritz GM of environmental strategy told Convene. Maritz chose iCompli to help build a product, and connected with Hansen to pilot its approach with itsclients — “it was wildly successful,” Riggs said, and she began working with Hansen when he launched Reduce 2.
One client Maritz approached was Mastercard, because it had a demonstrated commitment to sustainability. The head of Mastercard’s events “gave us their high-profile internal staff meeting to test this because their leadership wants Mastercard to be the most sustainable company in the world,” Riggs said. “We measured their carbon footprint with Glenn, the 2021 program retrospectively, and gave recommendations for reduction. We then measured and compared the 2022 and 2023 events, which showed a downward trend in per-person emissions.”
Maritz also worked with Reduce 2 to assess its own carbon footprint as an exhibitor at IMEX America 2023, where the company brought more than 100 hosted buyers to Las Vegas. “That’s the first time we’ve done it for an actual exhibitor,” Hansen said, “not the organizer, nor the venue.”
“Glenn and I worked to figure out how we could measure the impact” of all aspects of Maritz’s participation at IMEX America, Riggs said, from everyone’s travel, including ground transportation to their meals, and even the booth itself.
Corporations “are now focused on a linear progression” towards getting to net zero by 2050, Hansen said, in the events industry and beyond. The Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism, launched in late 2021 during the UN Climate Change Conference, signaled a commitment by tourism industry organizations to slash carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net zero before 2050.
“For those big companies that do a lot of events, they want to get the actuals so that they can be net zero quicker,” Riggs said. “They’re trying to get measurement at the actual level. It’s super exciting that we can get that granular in order to reach that goal.”
How granular? Convene asked Hansen to lay out what needs to be taken into account when calculating the carbon footprint of an event and what kinds of recommendations are made to move forward. As it turns out, there’s a lot of ground to cover.
The Biggest Culprit
Of all the factors that contribute to an event’s carbon footprint, more than 80 percent is going to be air travel, Hansen said. That calculation involves more than flight miles, including such factors as the class of service. “Business class can double or triple the emissions because of the space that you occupy,” he said, “if you think of the square feet that business class takes up relative to coach.” Also part of the calculation is ground transport — how one gets to the airport, the host destination venue, back to the airport, and home.
The biggest issue in the biggest category is “radiative forcing,” he said. “If you think of contrails coming out of the jets, the notion is the contrail keeps heat from escaping and also keeps heat from coming in. Causing the heat from escaping is what’s causing the planet to warm. There are some scientists who suggest that you should use a factor” of between two and six times the emissions of the jet engine itself, for overall emissions.
Glenn Hansen
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) takes the position — “now we understand it’s an organization of civil aviation — that if the scientists can’t agree, we can’t agree,” so ICAO does not include the impact of radiative forcing in its calculator, Hansen said. If you have a client who does include radiative forcing in its emissions total and then a client who doesn’t — “and that’s 80-85 percent of your emissions,” he said — “you can have two very big different numbers.” But, he added, the one with the lower total “is not really greenwashing” because a calculator gave them the answer. “This calculator uses this methodology, and this calculator uses that methodology: Somebody has to figure out the pluses and minuses of each methodology.”
Once on the ground, the transportation used for any off-sites at events needs to be factored in from a carbon perspective. Moving on from that is event F&B — “we’ll look at breakfast, lunch, and dinner — beef, chicken, fish, vegetarian, vegan? Gallons of coffee, tea, decaf, soft drinks, water. Then, the evening hours with wine, spirits, and beer. All of those have their own separate carbon emissions factors,” Hansen said. “We need to know the quantity of everything. Sometimes on a BEO, when it’s not a plated meal but a buffet, you typically don’t have precise counts, but there is an average buffet factor that you use — beef is a factor of six compared to chicken, which is a factor of three.”
Total guest-room nights and the venue space for the group get measured via a few resources. Hansen said that “between Google and TripAdvisor and the hotels themselves, you can find a sustainability tab someplace. There might be the kilograms of carbon emissions per guest room night stay. If you use Google flights or use Google to book your hotel, Google typically will have an emissions factor on there.”
Hansen’s first step is to go directly to the hotel to ask if it is publicly disclosing this information. If not, he’ll look at Google, TripAdvisor, and Expedia. If that data is not available on any of those sites, his next option is the Cornell Sustainability Benchmarking Index. “You can go in there not by brand name, but by geography and star rating,” he said. “In other words, is it a three-star hotel or a five-star hotel? Is it an urban or a suburban location? Is it a resort? It’ll give you data that they’ve collected from the hotels themselves, a carbon emissions factor for the guest room night, and then separately per square foot of meeting space, if there is meeting space in the hotel.”
Once he has that data, he said, he “can come up with a nearabout precise carbon emissions per room night stay. Then we go to the venue and we say, ‘Okay, what data do you have? What rooms did [a particular group] use? How many square feet or meters? How many hours was it occupied?’”
The energy that was consumed to accommodate people in that room is factored at a per-hour kilowatt rate. Going deeper into assessing the meeting space includes such considerations as, “Did they bring stuff in? Are they shipping stuff out? Now we get into freight,” he continued. “If it’s a trade show, there’s a lot of stuff that moves in and out. If it’s a corporate event, they may have staging, AV, and production that has brought all the staging in and that’s going to move out as soon as this event is over. Sometimes they’ll have tabletop exhibit displays. We have to look at the freight of everything shipped in for the event and when the event was over, everything that got shipped out. That’s a combination of distance and type of vehicle. Is it an aircraft or is it a tractor trailer, or is it a box truck or is it a van? Each of those have their own carbon emissions factors.” The calculation can even include fuel type consumed — petrol, diesel, and whether it was a hybrid, or electric vehicle.
Waste
Then there’s the end stage of an event. “If there was an exhibit area, what did people leave behind? Was it reusable? Was it recyclable? Did it go into landfill? Then it’s landfill incineration or recycled calculations,” he said. “We ask the venue what they’re actually doing with the trash.” Some venues sort paper and cardboard, plastics, and metals, at the back of the house, and how that is taken care of, including method of transport to haul it away, the weight of waste that went out, and what type of matter/material it is — “there are carbon emissions factors for each of those,” he said.
If leftover food is donated to a charity, Hansen said, you should be “mindful of double counting because you can argue that’s [the charity’s] emissions factor because they’re coming to get it and they’re taking it away and they’re doing something with it. I would argue that the donation company that’s coming and picking it up, that’s on their nickel to figure that out.”
Making a Significant Impact
Hansen said organizations need to be clear about the difference between sustainability optics and actually meaningful metrics. If they’re looking at optics, they should avoid using single-use plastic water bottles and serving beef and prioritize vegetarian or vegan items on the menu.
“But when you sit me down to do the calculation,” he said, and that’s all you’ve done, “you’re going to only have moved the needle that much, right? If 85 percent [of your carbon footprint] is air transport, the fact that you cut the beef out is more optics than anything else. Whereas if they said, ‘Okay, our baseline is X. Our emissions this year were 50 tonnes. We want to reduce every year by 3 percent over the next 10 years.’ Oh, okay —now it’s about the metrics. Now I will give you advice, what you need to do to make the most meaningful change on the metrics, not the most optical one.”
The Results
Maritz developed a graphic that demonstrates the environmental impact, arranged into key reporting categories, of Mastercard’s high-level internal staff meetings in 2021 and 2022. The variance in each category is evident at both the aggregated and per-person levels. While CO2 emissions increased in most categories due to a higher guest count and other factors, per-person CO2 emissions decreased in five of six categories.
“Big design decisions make an impact at the per-person level,” Maritz’s Rachael Riggs said. “We are on the path to measuring more and more events with other clients and making an impact for them, our industry, and the world.”
The Impact of Site Selection
Reduce 2’s Glenn Hansen worked with Maritz on reducing one of its clients’ carbon footprint by focusing on site selection. Hansen explained how this worked (client has been anonymized): “We asked, ‘How far out are you booked?’” The client had moved from host destination California to Barcelona, Spain. “Then they had signed up for Rome. That’s when the site selection contracts end — that’s now 2025,” Hansen said.
Given the fact that air travel is an event’s largest contributor to carbon emissions, that client won’t be able to lessen its impact in that area until the next event in 2026.
Working with Maritz, “we did an analysis of where everyone is coming from, and said to them, ‘Here’s the central location you should choose if you want to minimize air travel and if you want to maximize public transport.’ They told me they chose 2026 based on those factors and are going to hold it [at a destination that is] within a reasonable commute for 60 percent of their attendees. Now they’re going to really have a positive impact.”
The challenge will be how participants rate the experience. “If it’s a good experience, you now are going to be locked into a tight site-selection process based on where everybody’s coming from. If the purpose of the meeting is sales and incentives, and you want to incentivize people, you might pick a location that appeals to that objective and not really care [as much] about the emissions that time. Maybe you do a five-year plan and three times you go to a central location and once or twice you go to something that’s really the outer limits. You put that in the plan” — what Hansen calls a “carbon budget” — “and you present that to your community, saying: ‘Here’s how we’re going to go about this. One year we’re going to blow the air travel on our emissions, but then hopefully, and certainly within five years’ time, we begin to see more sustainable aviation fuel so that the emissions factor drops.’”
“Net zero means net zero. It doesn’t mean reduce to zero by offsets.,” said Reduce2’s Glenn Hansen.(Chloe Niclas illustration)
The Question of Offsets
Reduce 2’s Glenn Hansen said if you elect to use offsets to mitigate your event’s carbon footprint, make sure you verify that the offset company actually does what they say they’re going to do. “Then the question is how much is overhead versus how much good actually gets done,” he said.
But offsets will get us only so far, he said. “Net zero means net zero. It doesn’t mean reduce to zero by offsets. By 2050, offsets are likely to be off the table as we know them today. The Science Based Targets initiative is studying the issue of offsets for Scope 3 emissions and will announce in due course. However, in 2030, you can still use offsets to get to your 50-percent reduction, but by 2050, they’re gone,” he said. “That’s still far enough away that anyone in the offsets business is going to make a living over the next few years, but eventually that’s got to go. We need safe, sustainable aviation fuel.”
“Carbon offsets are not really where we should start,” Maritz’s Rachael Riggs concurred. “An offset is just a panacea. We need to start talking about reduction.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.
On the Web
Learn more about:
- Reduce 2 at reduce2.com
- Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index at greenview.sg/services/chsb-index/
- Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions at sustain.life/blog/scope-emissions