As part of the project team, it was my role to ensure that we delivered the event in the most sustainable way we could. The first step to achieve this was to map-out the main sustainability impacts of the event: social, economic and environmental. We developed specific guidelines to help ensure these issues and opportunities were addressed in awarding contracts for the event.
It was vitally important to us that everyone working on the event knew how important sustainability was to us and helped us to deliver the event as sustainably as possible. I lost count of the number of times I said “Have you got a copy of our Sustainability Guidelines for Events?”, “Are you following our Sustainability Guidelines for Events?” etc etc within two weeks of starting the project.
It has to be said that this approach really did work for us. The results achieved were completely through a team effort to deliver sustainably, and it was only because of team working that we achieved the results we did.
The key highlights for me were:
1. Inclusion: Providing an accessible viewing area including sign language interpreters and audio description services.
2. Healthy materials: All banner materials made for the event were made from polyester and could be recycled after the event.
3. Merchandise: All useful or collector items (T-shirts, pins, pens, mugs etc). Minimal packaging, eg swing tags only for mugs and pens (no presentation boxes). Pens made from recycled plastic. Paper bags used only.
4. Waste: Ensuring there were sufficient bins for recyclables and non-recyclables, providing compost bins for tea bags, complemented by roving recycling and litter collection teams.
5. Energy: Using LED lighting helped reduce energy consumption in the hospitality areas and on stage (unfortunately, the weather didn’t lend itself sufficiently for the solar panels on the merchandise units to be sufficiently ‘productive’).
But there were definitely some lessons learned. It pretty much goes without saying, early planning, the more notice you can give suppliers, the more options you have in terms of sustainable transportation of goods, using the most sustainable materials etc.
A key and very visible observation from the event itself however taught us exactly how important the location and labelling of waste bins is recycling:
1. Recycling bins located near concessions tended to be contaminated with general waste more so than those located further away.
2. Recycling points where there were staff present to guide guests where to put their waste showed a visible improvement in the volume of recyclables collected.
Clearly there were some aspects to the event you could argue were unsustainable, but I think it is really important that these things are looked at against the wider picture and the economic and social dimensions of sustainability are considered together with the environmental.
We don't profess that this was a perfect sustainability example, but we recognise we have made major achievements. The very nature of sustainability and the British Standard for Sustainable Events (BS 8901) is about making continual improvement. That is exactly what we will be doing with the lessons from this event, as we use them to continually develop our approach hosting more sustainable events.
My Olympics
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