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The decisions that make an event sustainable are taken before anyone mentions the word, and the things labelled sustainable at events tend to change very little.
Sustainable events are the ones planned to cut the travel, energy, food and material they use, to treat the people who work on them fairly and to leave something useful in the place that hosts them, and the gap between that and what gets the green label is what greenwashing in our industry usually looks like. It is rarely a lie. It is an emphasis on the visible objects of an event, the bag, the badge, the water bottle, while the decisions that shape its real impact are taken earlier, by other people, and out of habit.
The congress bag with a leaf on it
A few years ago the congress bag was a plastic folder or a synthetic bag with the event logo. Today it is often a cotton tote printed with the word “eco” and a small leaf. Inside there is a printed program, a few sponsor brochures, a notebook, a pen and a plastic bottle of water. Participants carry it for a day, leave most of the contents in the hotel room and take the bag home, where it joins a dozen others from previous events. The bag changed. The thinking behind it did not.
In practice that covers energy, waste, transport and food, but also the working conditions of temporary staff and the share of money that stays with local suppliers. It is less about grand gestures than about dozens of ordinary choices of where, when, how and with whom. The difficulty is that these choices are invisible on the day. Nobody photographs a well negotiated venue contract or an accurate catering count, and everybody photographs the tote bag, so the bag gets the attention and the contract is left to routine.
Sustainability in events, one of the few event trends for 2027 already written into tenders, also tends to save money rather than cost it. The organizer who hears “we agree in principle but the budget does not allow it” is often hearing a mistaken assumption, because many of the most effective measures reduce the bill.
For organizations that want a framework rather than a slogan, ISO 20121, the international standard for event sustainability management, covers the social and economic side as well as the environmental one. What I like about it is that it is a management system: who is responsible, what the objectives are, how suppliers are brought in, how results are reviewed. A certificate held by a venue or a supplier does not make every event held there sustainable, though, and a claim should say exactly what it covers.
A metro stop near the venue
In most of the events I know, the largest part of the footprint comes from people travelling to and around the event. I can’t give you a precise figure for this, but it is what nearly everyone who has looked closely at an event’s impact ends up saying. A congress that flies in hundreds of participants from several continents will not be made sustainable by switching to paper cups. For some sessions the more honest question is whether a speaker needs to fly in at all, or whether that part of the program would work just as well as a virtual event.
Most of an event’s impact is decided in planning meetings nobody associates with sustainability, which is exactly why greenwashing thrives at the end of the process.
So the venue and destination decision matters more than anything that happens inside the hall. Can participants reach the venue by public transport, or will each of them need a taxi or a shuttle? Are the hotels within walking distance, or will buses run back and forth all day? Does the venue already have the sound, lighting and furniture the event needs, or will trucks bring everything from another city? In any destination these questions are very concrete. A city congress centre with a metro stop nearby and hotels a short walk away has a very different footprint from a resort venue that needs airport transfers for every participant. Neither choice is wrong in itself, and resort congresses exist for good reasons, but the choice should be made knowing what it implies rather than discovering it afterwards.
Local suppliers belong to the same early decisions. An event held in one city with all its equipment, print and catering brought from another leaves little behind where it happens, and it pays for the trucks as well. Asking the organization company to work with production companies and caterers based near the venue lowers transport and usually keeps more of the event’s spending in the place that hosts it.
Untouched trays and plastic bottles on every table
Catering is where waste is most visible and most avoidable. Anyone who has worked backstage at a congress, a gala or one of the large corporate events with a buffet for several hundred people knows the sight of full trays going back to the kitchen at the end of a buffet. The cause is usually simple: the organizer orders for more people than will eat, just in case, the caterer prepares more than was ordered, just in case, and nobody checks how many participants actually plan to attend each meal. In my view the most effective sustainability measure in most events is not a compostable plate but an accurate count. Asking at registration who will attend lunch or the gala dinner, updating the number with the caterer a few days before and preferring plated service to open buffets where the format allows all cut waste sharply and lower the bill at the same time. Where food is left over, some organizers arrange for it to go to a food bank or a local association, which takes coordination with the venue and caterer but is entirely possible. Seasonal menus help too, and a caterer in a farming region or on the coast who builds the menu around local produce will usually offer better food at a better price than one following an imported template.
Plastic water bottles are the clearest case of habit. Many congresses still place small bottles on every table, in every session, several times a day. Water dispensers and refillable bottles are a simple alternative that most hotel venues can provide if asked early enough, and asking early is the key, with the change written into the run of show, because on the day the banquet team will bring what it always brings.
Print is the trickier target. Programs, invitations, signage and catalogs add up to a great deal of paper, most of it thrown away within days, and moving to digital invitations, a QR coded program and screens for signage seems an obvious step. Far too often, though, the result is the half-digital event: the program lives in an app half the participants cannot download, so the registration desk prints copies at the last minute, and the QR code at the entrance does not open on older phones, so the hostesses hand out paper maps. The event pays for both and saves nothing. The answer is to make the digital tools genuinely usable and to decide clearly which printed items are still needed, so that a few well placed signs and a short printed program for those who want it sit alongside a working digital version for everyone else.
A stand that goes into a skip after three days
Trade fairs and large events carry a hidden waste problem in their stands and stage sets. A custom built stand designed for a three day fair is often made from materials that cannot be reused and goes straight into a skip at teardown. Many stage backdrops, branded walls and photo corners share the same fate.
This is where sustainability and cost point most clearly in the same direction. A modular stand that can travel to several fairs, a stage set built from standard elements the production company can use again, and branding that does not carry the year or the edition number, so it can return next year, all lower the cost over time. The obstacle is rarely money. It is habit, and the wish for something new and different every single time, which agencies and clients tend to encourage in each other.
I can already hear the marketing manager’s objection. A brand that turns up at the same fair with the same stand every year looks tired, and the competitor across the aisle has just built something new. That is a fair point, and nobody is asking a brand to look identical for a decade. A modular structure still allows new graphics, new lighting and a different layout each season, and the stand builders who work the big fairgrounds know how to do this well when they are asked. The trouble is that they are rarely asked. The brief arrives late and calls for something striking, and a stand designed in a fortnight is almost always built from scratch, because nobody had the time to plan for its second life.
A word printed on a panel is not a route. Recyclable means little if nobody at that venue collects and processes the material, and a compostable plate thrown into the same skip as everything else has only changed the price of the plate. The EPA’s waste management hierarchy puts it in the right order, with reducing and reusing well above recycling, so before either word goes into a report it is worth asking the venue where that material really ends up after teardown.
The hostess paid two months late
The social side of sustainability is often forgotten, and in our industry it matters a great deal. Events in most markets lean heavily on temporary teams: daily staff sent by hostess agencies, setup and teardown crews paid by the day, students partly called in from universities. Many work long hours with uncertain insurance and payments that arrive weeks or months late. An event that recycles its cups but pays its temporary staff two months after the job is not sustainable in any meaningful sense. Paying on time, providing meals and rest breaks, and making sure everyone on site is insured and briefed are part of sustainability, not a separate subject. They also have a practical effect, since staff who are treated well come back, and an event that can rely on experienced people year after year makes fewer mistakes and wastes less.
Institutional memory works the same way. An event that relearns everything each year, because what was known left with the people who moved on, repeats the same waste every time. A plain record of what was ordered, what was used, what was left over and what could have been avoided does more than most of the measures that end up on the sustainability slide.
Greenwashing is easy to recognize once you stop looking at the objects. Behind almost every item on the sustainability slide sits an earlier decision doing far more of the work.
| On the slide | The decision that carries the impact |
|---|---|
| a cotton tote with a leaf | whether a bag is needed at all, and what goes in it |
| paper cups instead of plastic | how participants reach the venue and the hotels |
| a QR coded program | whether the digital version works for everyone |
| recyclable stand panels | whether the stand is built to come back next year |
| compostable plates | a catering count updated before the day |
| a green line on the badge | temporary staff paid on time and insured |
If the venue was chosen without thinking about how people would arrive, the catering count was never updated, the stand was built new and the temporary staff were paid late, a recycled tote bag is decoration, however well meant. I have nothing against the bag, and I would rather see an organizer take a few honest steps than none, but I would like it to stop being the photo on the sustainability slide.