Cameron Roberts, editor, CN, sits down with Brian Brittain, global chief operating officer, RX Global, to understand the business’ sustainable direction.
Understanding the sustainable landscape is a matter of identifying priorities for an organiser of any size. For one the size of RX Global, the areas it chooses to focus upon make waves across the global events industry.
I sat down with Brian Brittain, global chief operating officer, RX Global, at the launch of net Zero Carbon Events’ guideline documents, to chat measurement, challenges and next steps for event sustainability.
Measurement
One of the common roadblocks organisers run into is where to start with sustainability, what is the base from which to improve upon. Brittain shares this sentiment, he said: “One of the things that we’ve been looking at is the measurement piece of this is amazingly challenging for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re an RX, if you’re the smallest or the largest organiser, it’s it is a challenge to figure out everything that goes into an event, when we start talking about the upstream and the downstream.
“Among the challenges that we’ve had, I know this is across the industry, is to get the actual data that is a challenge, whether it’s waste, electricity or logistics, getting that data from our partners, is incredibly challenging. The big venues, like the one we’re at today and Excel, they were built with that from day one, they understand it, they can report it as standard. It’s the smaller partners that we have, are still learning how to do it at scale.”
The positives of having such a universal challenge, according to Brittain, is that it’s a problem the industry can come together to solve, he says: “The good news, from our perspective, is that this is a global initiative, everyone sees the need to invest in sustainability. So, regardless of where you happen to be in the world, it is part of the conversation.
“Now it’s about helping the venues, our suppliers and our customers understand how they can influence an impact. I don’t see it as a specific problem with one jurisdiction or one specific venue or anything like that.”
First steps
For those beginning on the measurement journey, Brittain emphasises two critical pieces of advice for progress.
He says: “Step number one, start working with venues. Because that will be a large chunk of the carbon impact accounted for. It’s something that organisers can start getting tangible numbers for, as most venues do have the data now, for electricity and waste. That’s a great starting point.
“From that point, start to fingerprint your organisation’s actual stance at your event. For example, in our sustainable philosophy we don’t actually have that many single use stands. But until you do the measuring until you really figure it out, how do you know how to move forward with this plan? So you have an opinion, then you have to go out to the data to actually figure how to move forward.”
