Wait long enough and all faded fashions come back in vogue.
Environmentalists tried to green a nation in the ’60s, only to watch mass consumerism squelch the cause. Green stood on the sidelines right up until 2005, when Hurricane Katrina sparked national talk of climate change. A year later, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth brought the potential catastrophic effects of global warming to the silver screen, and to the attention of the world.
“Green is sexy, finally. I never thought I would live to see this,” says Amy Spatrisano, principal of Portland, Ore.-based Meeting Strategies Worldwide, a management, consulting and training firm specializing in green meetings services. Spatrisano is also chair of the CIC’s Green Meetings Task Force and co-founder of the Green Meeting Industry Council, which launched in 2004 with the help of Nancy J. Wilson, also a principal at Meeting Strategies Worldwide.
“It’s not a fad,” Spatrisano emphasizes. “It’s the way organizations are doing business. Resources are becoming rare and expensive. When it starts hitting the pocketbook, they start paying attention.”
As big business, right up to the Fortune 1000, is donning shades of green, the meetings industry is following suit. Green meetings, green hotels, green convention centers, green suppliers, and international awards for being green are all beginning to grab the limelight. In the tourism sector green is already a source of profit. According to the International Ecotourism Society, ecotourism is a $77 billion industry in the U.S. alone.
Spatrisano, who takes her green meetings agenda to meeting professionals nationwide, recently asked at a PCMA meeting why planners were interested in going green—was it a personal passion or were they being told to? Over 75 percent said it was a personal passion.
A Growth Market
But demand within the industry is growing. A 2006 survey by IMEX (a major international exhibition for meetings and incentive travel) reported that 67 percent of buyers took the environment into account and 61 percent of buyers would deliberately avoid a destination or venue with a poor environmental record.
In 2003 IMEX introduced the Green Meeting Award and recently partnered with the Green Meeting Industry Council to launch the Green Exhibitor Award and Green Supplier Award.
Tourism Toronto conducted its own survey of meeting planners, asking if they would be more likely to do business with a CVB or destination actively looking to improve its impact on the environment; 55 percent replied “yes.”
But green meetings are still in their relative infancy.
“I still find resistance from both planners and suppliers who think it costs more money,” Spatrisano says. “They think it’s a hassle—now I’ve got to do this green meetings thing. Three myths on the part of planners are that it is too expensive to do a majority of the steps necessary, if they can’t do it 100 percent green why bother, and it requires too much effort.”
Spatrisano and green meeting leaders are working to get the message across that being green is not only right for the environment, it can actually save money.
In the CIC’s 2004 Green Meetings Report, a thorough starter’s guide for planners turning green, statistics highlight the benefits of greening a meeting. By not pre-filling water glasses at banquet tables during three days of served lunches for 2,200 attendees, a company can save 520 gallons of water, while collecting badge holders for reuse at an event of 1,300 attendees can save nearly $1,000 for the organizer. For the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Atlanta in 2005, $25,000 was saved by using water stations and compostable cups instead of water bottles.
“Another statistic is our own example,” Spatrisano says.
She and Wilson were planning a meeting several years ago in the Midwest at a facility that only used Styrofoam cups. For 2,500 attendees over five days, they ordered 72,000 compostable paper cups.
“We were one meeting management firm in one city, and we ended up preventing the use of a lot of Styrofoam,” Spatrisano remembers. “I realized we really can make a difference.”
The CIC’s Green Meetings Report is the closest document the industry has to a standard at the moment, though there are other guidelines out there. The EPA published the It’s Easy Being Green document in 1996, listing mandatory requirements for green meetings. The EPA recently announced the greening of its own meetings. Starting May 1, all EPA purchasing agents began asking a series of questions when researching potential meeting spaces.
“We have a series of 14 questions we ask before we decide who gets the award,” says Tom O’Connell, director for the Research Triangle Park Procurement Operations Division of the EPA.
“The next step is to develop some criteria that we can get everybody to agree on,” O’Connell says. “We have to get input from the industry. As of now if a supplier complies with seven green initiatives from the 14 but not the other seven, are they green or not green?”
Sustainable Travel International, a nonprofit that revolves around education and outreach, works with industry names such as Continental, Marriott and Leading Hotels of the World to help reduce their carbon footprint.
“We work with a lot of meeting planners. Interest in that area continued to increase in the last year,” says Brian Mullis, cofounder and president of the organization since its inception in 2002. “I don’t think planners realize with their buying power they can make certain demands, such as biodegradable and recyclable materials. They don’t realize what is available. Once they have the information, they are empowered—they can initiate change. They can offer an event with a much lighter footprint.”
Some locations are easier than others.
“The West Coast, as you can imagine, is doing a better job, and some pockets in the East Coast are okay. Not much is happening at all in middle of the country, in my experience,” Spatrisano maintains.
Meeting Strategies Worldwide is working with Chicago to boost its level of green for the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild conference in November.
Some states and cities are putting in place their own green initiatives. Travel Green Wisconsin is a voluntary program formed by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism that reviews, certifies and recognizes tourism businesses that are committed to reducing their environmental impact. The state piloted the program last year and has been steadily gaining momentum, with Madison’s Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center and Alliant Energy Center the two largest spaces certified.
“People are getting more recognition by being sustainable, and seeing more business,” says Will Christianson, outreach coordinator for the State of Wisconsin Department of Tourism. Word is getting out that it’s all about saving money, according to Christianson, with a potential to reduce energy prices, water use and the waste sent to a landfill.
“Virginia for the last four or five years has been realizing it’s finally fashionable to be green,” says Tom Griffin, outreach coordinator for the state’s Office of Pollution Prevention. “We’ve been developing voluntary programs and initiatives but we stayed away from the word green for years because it had such a liberal connotation. Now it’s a much more accepted term.”
Virginia, like California, Michigan, Florida, Vermont, and other states, has its own certification program for green hotels. Griffin is the coordinator of the Virginia Green Lodging program, which has certified 50 properties for their conservation efforts. Plans are to spread the program to all sectors of the state’s tourism market.
Toronto Mayor David Miller publicly stated his goal for Toronto to be the greenest city in North America. Tourism Toronto earlier this year formed an internal green team and is offering planners green meeting education programs.
The Toronto-based Green Tourism Association, a not-for-profit membership organization, keeps the green team in check.
“We go to them for advice to make sure we’re not ‘greenwashing,’” says Tom Griffin, business analyst for Tourism Toronto.
The business case for going green is not all about money, according to Griffin.
“Demand is changing everywhere,” he says. “People are more environmentally aware. You have to be on the leading edge.”
Advice for Planners
As planners sift through all the new jargon, one looming question remains: What is a green meeting?
According to Spatrisano, the accepted definition from the CIC’s Green Meetings Report reads: “A green meeting incorporates environmental considerations throughout all stages of the meeting in order to minimize the negative impact on the environment.” That leaves the field wide open.
Spatrisano emphasizes the “all stages” aspect embedded in the definition, from the RFP through the conclusion of the event. The first step, she says, is to establish commitment for a green meeting by consulting with decision-makers and impressing on them that the green initiative will save money and improve the company’s image as well as the environment. One key is to develop a green team, to get staff onboard.
She acknowledges the learning curve involved and advises planners, “Use a green filter on everything you do, whether it’s site selection criteria for a city or a hotel. While you’re asking how many rooms, also ask if the hotel has a towel and sheet reuse program, energy efficiency program, water conservation program.”
Some efforts benefit the planner, such as providing recycling areas on an exhibit floor, which saves garbage hauling fees, though others, such as requiring organic foods, can incur some extra cost.
Another step is to develop minimum guidelines—a list of green criteria—best included in RFPs, for convention centers, accommodations, food and beverage, exhibitors, and transportation. Excess food and beverage, for instance, should be donated to a local food bank.
“The most common pushback I get is from caterers when we ask about donating food,” Spatrisano says. “They tell me it’s against the health code. But in reality the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act passed in 1996 prevents anyone who donates food in good faith from being sued. Every major city in U.S. has some kind of donation program, some food redistribution center.”
Spatrisano also emphasizes the importance of communicating policies, such as providing a CVB with green objectives, informing attendees of green practices and ensuring that suppliers understand the commitment. Green practices should be embedded in a contract, including follow-up procedures such as verification of recycled materials by asking for recycled weights and measures.
Carbon Neutral?
One somewhat controversial green initiative is the use of carbon offset programs, where money is donated to a green organization to offset the greenhouse gases caused by attendee flights or car travel to the facility. The argument is that a company’s practices should be refined first to eliminate the carbon footprint rather than resorting to offsets to make them carbon neutral.
“Calling an event carbon neutral is a bit of misnomer,” Spatrisano says. “Carbon neutral means write a big check to offset travel and energy use in facilities. Companies don’t have to change their behavior. The danger in the carbon neutral component is they’re missing the whole premise. First reduce, then reuse, then recycle.”
But for the inevitable carbon footprint from transportation and other resources used, carbon offsets are an option at a cost often paid for by attendees or the meeting organization.
A primary focus of Sustainable Travel International is its carbon offset program. The company will assess the carbon footprint and suggest well-researched nonprofit organizations such as MyClimate, which reinvests a minimum of 80 percent of all gross revenues from the sale of carbon offsets into the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in Africa, Asia and Central America.
There are also creative solutions on the supplier side. Professional Marketing Services Inc. (PMSI) offers promotional business items, 20 percent of which are green.
“If an association decides its initiative is to go green in meetings, they have to use green items,” says PMSI President Marty Bear.
PMSI manufactures meeting badges from 100 percent recycled soda bottles, while the fabric lanyards are from 50 percent recycled nylon content. Other items include recycled tote bags, organic cotton T-shirts and journal gift books with recycled paper, recycled coil wire and a recycled pen. Most products do not cost more than their non-recycled counterparts.
For exhibitors, green solutions are hard to find, but there are still options.
PricewaterhouseCoopers recently released the results of a research project on the Top 10 most trash-producing industries in the world. The trade show industry came in second, just behind construction.
Eco-Systems Sustainable Exhibits, an offshoot from Exhibit Design Consultants, took home the Buyer’s Choice Award earlier this year at the Exhibitor 2007 trade show in Las Vegas for its sustainable design. The exhibit system is developed with environmentally responsible materials benchmarked to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System of the U.S. Green Building Council.
The Michigan-based company uses found materials, recycled content and other environmental materials such as bamboo, sorghum and cork. The only setback is that the exhibits typically cost 20 percent to 30 percent more to create, according to company President Timothy Morris.
“Our market will pay more for a sustainable product,” he asserts.
Eco-Systems works with Pittsburgh-based Stetson Convention Services, a general contractor and decorator for trade shows, expositions and events. Stetson uses items such as compostable wastebasket liners and table coverings, carpet with 25 percent recycled content, and banner material that composts down to powder as an alternative to vinyl.
“We’re proud to be a steward,” says Anah Corley, business development manager for Stetson, which is the exclusive decorator for the U.S. Green Building Council’s annual Greenbuild conference. “The difference between us and other general contractors is we’re a midlevel company and can make radical changes on a day to day basis. We find new products and bring them into the inventory to use right away. Larger companies have a harder time doing that.”
For companies and planners who prefer an expert to help with greening meeting, there are also choices.
Northern California’s Green Peas Events focuses only on organizing green meetings. Janet Cooperman, the company’s sole proprietor, provides a full green assessment of the city, site and suppliers, including recycling programs, public transportation options and sustainable meal options, among other aspects.
“Planners should know they don’t have to do this alone,” Cooperman says.
Meeting Strategies Worldwide offers MeetGreen, a comprehensive program that examines all elements of meetings and conferences and offers recommendations on how to reduce their environmental impact. The program includes the MeetGreen Calculator, launched in partnership with StarCite in January. The calculator provides a green assessment of events by measuring over 95 facets of policy, practices and outcomes, from food and beverage choices to site selection.
“The key thing is the calculator allows planners to track improvement in meetings—areas they are doing well in and areas that need improvement,” says Mike Concannon, StarCite’s director of corporate services.
Still, organizing a green meeting, no matter what color green, can be daunting for first-timers.
“Be kind to yourself in the process,” Spatrisano says. “It’s a journey, not a destination. You’re not going to get everything done.”
