How to plan an event the green way

Green event planning

While recycling paper and plastic, using reusable cloth bags for shopping, and limiting your use of the motor car can all help to minimize your impact on our fragile planet, living green doesn't have to stop at home.

If you're in charge of organizing an event, be it your parents' 50th wedding anniversary party or your employer's annual residential conference, there are a number of ways in which you can extend your green lifestyle practices to ensure that the event takes place in an environmentally healthy manner.

Choosing the venue

We all know that driving generates a large amount of greenhouse gas and that we should try to limit our dependency on the motor car. Therefore, when selecting a venue for your event, consider whether your participants will be able to reach it using alternative transport.

To this end, select a venue that is easily accessible by public transport, one that's located in a city or town that has links to reliable rail and bus services.

If you're organizing a large conference or similar event that's scheduled to run over a number of days, you will almost certainly have to work closely with the venue's organizers in the run up to the event and during it. Your job will be made a lot easier if the venue owners are sympathetic to your intentions, or at least understand why it's important for your event to be hosted in an environmentally sound way.

It's much easier to persuade a venue owner to serve Fairtrade tea and coffee at break times if they understand the issues behind your motives. Therefore, choose a venue whose owners have green practices in place or have a good record of having successfully hosted events in an environmentally conscious way. Discuss your concerns with the organizers to ensure that they will be able to meet your requests before entering into a contract.

Before the event

E-mail all relevant documents (e.g. invitation, promotional material) directly to participants, directing them to your or your employer's website for further information. Use the website to post all relevant information about the event, e.g. directions to the venue, registration form.

Try to limit the need for attendees to print off documents. For example, if an agenda is needed for your meeting, produce it as a PowerPoint slide and project it onto a large screen in the meeting room or conference hall so that all attendees can see it.

If you are handing out merchandise at your event, ensure that all products are environmentally friendly. This is very important if your event has a "green" theme -- you don't want someone telling you how much of the earth's resources have gone into producing the superfluous plastic bags containing the key fobs you gave out as a souvenir!

If you're using plastic name tag holders for participants to wear, collect these after the event for re-use in the future.

Ensure that all signage is re-usable.

Transportation

If the venue is some distance from the nearest public transport station or depot, then arrange transportation for the attendees. Obviously, you will need to tie in pick-ups and drop-offs with the public transport schedule operating on the day. This is very important if you are encouraging attendees to leave their cars at home and take public transport to your event.

If the venue is within walking distance, then you still might need to encourage participants to walk to the event rather than take a taxi. Highlight some of the sights they will see en route to the venue if they opt to walk.

If people have to drive to the event, use your website to facilitate a car sharing scheme to enable attendees to travel together thus reducing the number of motor cars needed. Remind all concerned that this also applies to organizers and presenters!

Food and beverage

If you are arranging food and beverages, use local produce wherever possible, and always offer a vegetarian dish. Less energy is needed to produce vegetables: according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, the international meat industry generates approximately 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions -- more than transportation. If the venue organizers are going to be responsible for food, then discuss with them what you would like on the menu.

Don't use throw-away materials - no disposable plates, knives, forks, or spoons. Use non-plastic spoons at coffee/tea breaks, and wherever possible, use crockery and not Styrofoam plates and cups.

Condiments should ideally be served in re-usable containers and not in individual plastic sachets.

Use cloth napkins and table cloths at meals. If paper napkins have to be used, use highly compostable napkins.

Provide attendees with personal mugs at the beginning of the event and request that they use them for coffee/water service. Have them produced with your company's logo or personalized in such a way that they can be taken away after the event as a souvenir of the occasion.

Don't provide water in individual plastic water bottles. Have water urns placed at various points in the venue for participants to use.

Should anyone question any of your practices then let them know that you are organizing your event in such a way as to minimize the impact on the planet. Point out that plastic stirrer sticks and individual plastic condiment sachets are unnecessary and contribute to ever increasing landfills across the globe. For example, it's reported that Americans throw away 25 billion Styrofoam cups every year.

Hosting a green event doesn't have to be about trying to convert individuals to change their way of living, but it can be one way to show people that protecting our planet's finite resources doesn't have to be something that we only do when we're at home.