 |
I am always astounded by big trade shows — the number of people, size of the buildings, and all the crates and booths. What can convention centers do to be Green, and what can we do to be Greener exhibitors after we get to the show?
|
Believe it or not, some convention centers have been making strides behind the scenes for years. A number of them have programs to divert waste and promote Green practices with show organizers. And, as your question suggests, some of the Greenest opportunities depend on what exhibitors do before and after a show.
Who’s In Charge Here?
We think of convention centers as places, but they are really communities. Every show has an organizer and general contractor, plus a myriad of labor contractors, technicians, exhibit houses, van lines, florists, concessioners, and entertainers who converge for few days to create a tradeshow experience. Every one of them has a different workforce and unique policies and challenges. Greening a tradeshow means getting them to buy in and coordinate their efforts. It takes communication, good intentions, and clear goals.
San Francisco’s Moscone Center involved its user community in building that kind of plan. Their success in diverting three quarters of their landfill waste offers some useful lessons.
The big challenge was easy to see: it’s the mountain of waste that every tradeshow generates. That mountain includes truckloads of foam core, pallets of abandoned literature, cardboard and wooden packing materials, food containers, plastic beverage bottles, and exhibits that some companies simply abandon on the show floor in order to avoid return shipping costs.
Abandoned exhibits can be a significant challenge, partly because much of an exhibit is difficult, if not impossible to recycle. Suffice to say, your exhibit is your responsibility and shouldn’t contribute to a convention center’s waste stream. If you are interested in disposing of an old exhibit after the show, some convention centers will help you find schools or nonprofit organizations that would appreciate the donation.
Like Moscone, some convention centers have active donation programs for used foam core and lumber also. Meanwhile, some concessioners use compostable food containers that can be separated from recyclables and trash when people discard them.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
These programs divert a tremendous amount of waste from landfills at the back end, but their capacity for waste diversion has limits. We need to think about tradeshow waste at the front end too.
Roughly three-quarters of the material in convention center debris bins is wood, most of it from discarded shipping containers. A lot of that wood made a one-way trip from the forest to the show floor. When you consider that plywood is extremely energy intensive to manufacture, much of that waste also carries a substantial carbon footprint along with last-minute show graphics.
Some show halls recycle wood but many do not. If your shipper or labor contractor can’t haul it to a recycling center, but you want to avoid the cost of packing out what you pack in, the trick may be finding ways to minimize last-minute shipments that require wooden boxes, pallets, and braces. Printing graphics locally or renting local properties might fit the bill.
Another significant portion of show floor waste comes from discarded literature —all those opened boxes of brochures that nobody wants to ship home. It’s worth remembering that very little of this literature ever leaves town. Most of it ends up in hotel wastebaskets, where recycling is an iffy proposition.
That’s a poor ROI equation by any measure: you pay for printing and ship boxes of brochures to the tradeshow, often on pallets, often bundled in plastic, and often at premium airfreight and drayage rates. During move-in, the plastic and pallets enter the waste stream. You distribute a large percentage of your brochures to attendees who dutifully contribute them to the waste stream for you. During move-out, you stack the remaining brochures in the aisles, where the show contractor adds the rest of them to the waste stream too. From cost and environmental perspectives, literature looks like a bad investment, which is why so many companies are switching to e-brochures instead.
Conductors and Players
We are all familiar with the energy conservation during move-in and move-out, when lighting is dimmed and some escalators and elevators are unavailable. These practices are ubiquitous because convention center managers can implement on their own.
The next steps depend on exhibitors and industry suppliers. Convention centers are communities, after all, not single entities, and their managers are like conductors who coax music out of an orchestra’s diverse instruments and personalities.
Every sound an orchestra makes comes from an individual player, and the same can be said of tradeshow waste. Ultimately, reducing tradeshow waste comes down to the things we ship in and out of their doors.
|
click year for articles
|
 |
Tom Bowman, president of Bowman Design Group in Signal Hill, CA, works with national institutions on
climate change and sustainability communications and is a frequent speaker at exhibit industry and professional conferences. tom@bowmandesigngroup.com |
|
|
