Christianne (Chrissie) Beck, founder, Worlds Better, details how event sustainability has evolved over the last 12 months.
After a long stint in the live event delivery world, I got bored of the big chatter and limited action when it came to applying sustainability to managing international events. It broke my heart to see so much waste, so many emissions created carelessly and rare buy in from key decision makers.
I was flying the sustainability flag for many years that, it seemed, very few supported. So around one year ago, I used my experience and a lot of training and I made a leap. I launched Worlds Better, where I focus my efforts full time to helping agencies and in house event teams operate more sustainably. Worlds Better works with corporate event teams like OVO Energy and HP Industrial and event agencies such as Identity, Yellow Fish and Owl Live in whatever way each business needs our help to achieve their sustainability ambitions.
What, I hear you asking, have I learnt in this time? How could any of my learnings throughout my experience to date, help you?
Well, number one thing I’ve learnt is that everyone is at different stages of their journey. Some are way ahead; others are just beginning and there’s everything in between. If you’re at the beginning and don’t know where to start don’t let this put you off doing something. Doing something is better than doing nothing at all, and we all must start somewhere. If you’re right at the start of your journey, contact an event sustainability consultancy who can talk you through the first steps to advise on how you can be operating more responsibly, build you a policy and to help you implement that policy.
Secondly, behaving sustainably isn’t just the right thing to do but it’s important for business. Companies that care and demonstrate successful sustainability achievements are seeing more (and more loyal) customers and better staff retention. Also, there will be legislation effecting brands, agencies, suppliers, venues, destinations, the list goes on, so it’ll be easier for you to prepare for that if you start now and get your house in order. For the agencies reading, if your clients aren’t yet prioritising sustainability, they will have to, soon! They will ask you to support those ambitions thereafter.
Thirdly, you must put the time and effort in to understand your impact. You can do this by measuring the emissions of your business operations, as well as your events (using event industry specialist carbon and waste measurement platforms like TRACE or Event Decision); building baselines and then reduction plans. Having that all important data to back everything up will be crucial to influencing stakeholders or clients to invest further in sustainability, and for reporting purposes. Worlds Better are working with several clients to measure their one-off events or entire event programmes to understand their events’ impact, use insights to act during the planning phase and identify areas for improvement for the future.
To be honest, I’ve learnt a lot over the past year and it’s hard to summarise it in just a few short words! But hopefully this gives you some food for thought.
