Winner's circle: Small changes make a big difference

The 2008 Oracle OpenWorld Conference won a Green Meetings Silver Award. Here’s why.

BY KATE CAPLETON

Putting together a citywide for 40,000 attendees takes a lot of energy – and a lot of organization. The 2008 Oracle OpenWorld Conference, software giant Oracle’s annual San Francisco citywide, used 2,300 computers. When you’re using that many computers, one big way to reduce environmental impact is just to turn them off each night – a free green idea that also saved money. The conference also used 37.5 percent less paper for on-demand printing and copying than it did in 2007, saving energy and reducing waste.

These standout energy- and paper-saving efforts are just a small part of a whole host of sustainable-meeting efforts that earned Oracle the 2008 Green Meetings Silver Award, given by IMEX, a worldwide exhibition for meetings and incentive travel. Oracle worked closely with MeetGreen, a meeting planning consultancy specializing in sustainable practices, to focus their efforts and ensure maximum impact.

The largest business software company in the world, Oracle has focused on sustainability issues at its meetings for several years now, in accordance with a company-wide policy, notes Vice President Paul Salinger, who also serves as director for the Green Meetings Industry Council (GMIC). “Oracle’s commitment to sustainability is a natural extension of our overall commitment to the environment embodied in our corporate citizenship statement: ‘Oracle is committed to developing products and practices that protect the environment,’” Salinger says. “This is the basis for our global green meeting strategy as well.”

That global green meetings strategy is starting to extend into the company’s smaller meetings, Salinger adds. “Using the best practices that we have developed over the last three years from Oracle OpenWorld, we are developing some simple key performance indicators that measure and track things like paper usage, signage usage and emissions from travel,” he says. “By creating some simple reporting tools to help the field organizations, we can track what we’re doing across our event portfolio and report on it to management. This allows us to gain efficiencies and control costs in some areas in order to maximize our program dollars for content and customer experience.”

While some of the company’s green efforts cost more than non-sustainable alternatives, Salinger says cost savings that come with consuming fewer resources offsets this. “The net is that we’ve actually saved money and re-invested it into areas that might be a little more costly, so that we can manage resources overall towards a more sustainable event environment,” he says. “Some of it is just rethinking what you do and filtering decisions through the lens of what makes sense towards being green against the budgetary goals for the event.”

Some of the event’s cost-saving and earth-friendly initiatives at OpenWorld included:

• Shrinking shuttle use by 11 coaches per day by expanding walking routes to host hotels, saving the program some $60,000.
• Saving shipping costs and fuel by not pre-printing and mailing name badges.
• Using on site AV wherever possible, preventing shipping of an estimated 50 percent of equipment used. This translated into three fewer freight shipments than in 2007.
• Recycling banners: 45 percent of the 2008 vinyl banners will be re-used for future Oracle events and 20 percent of banners used at the 2008 OpenWorld were used at previous events, for an estimated $89,250 savings.

Even if an event won’t have the supersized results of the Oracle conference, Salinger says it’s important to consider even small changes. “Do whatever you can,” he says, adding, “Don’t try to change the world in one event or in one year.”

While Oracle hired MeetGreen to help develop their sustainability initiatives, Salinger says there are a lot of other resources out there for planners just starting out, including best practices available on the GMIC Web site and the MeetGreen Web site. Most importantly though, he says, set objectives and goals and measure everything, so that you can see progress from event to event and from year to year.

Green Innovations

Across the country, planners and suppliers are joining forces to add a sustainable aspect to their events. Here is a sampling of their efforts.

1. GREEN MEALS – LITERALLY
How much more local can you get than herbs grown at the convention center? The Virginia Beach Convention Center now offers green-themed group/teambuilding experiences, including a cooking class led by Distinctive Gourmet, the convention center’s exclusive caterer, in which participants use herbs grown in the onsite garden and local home-grown produce to create a meal.

The convention center, which was purpose-built with sustainability in mind, is currently pursuing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver Certification, an international benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. Once it completes the process, it will become the first LEED-certified convention center on the East Coast, joining an elite group of six convention facilities in the U.S.: the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburg, Pa.; the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore.; the Spokane Convention Center Expansion, Spokane, Wash.; the Kansas City Convention Center Grand Ballroom, Kansas City, Mo.; the Phoenix Convention Center and the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The Virginia Beach Convention Center is the centerpiece of the city’s green hospitality initiative – and part of the state’s Virginia Green program, a partnership between the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, Virginia Tourism Corporation, and the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association. Virginia Beach has been named the first “Virginia Green Destination,” with more than 90 Virginia Green certified hospitality business within city limits.

2. MILLION  TONS OF TRASH CHALLENGE
The average meeting or event produces 20 pounds of waste per person per day compared to an average waste production of five pounds daily by individuals at home. With about 700 million event attendees annually in the U.S. and Canada alone, that adds up to an estimated 10.5 tons of waste every year.

The Green Meetings Industry Council would like to see that change, and has launched an initiative encouraging meeting planners to divert a million tons of trash – or 10 percent of what they throw away – from landfills this year. Organizations participating in the challenge (which is free to join) get access to a measurement tool to estimate how much trash they have diverted, recycled or composted. Currently, 25 organizations have submitted data, with an estimated 100,000 tons diverted so far, and another 30 organizations have pledged to reduce their impact. For more information or to sign up, visit trashchallenge.com.

3. TEAM UP FOR GREEN
MeetGreen has come up with another way to drive suppliers toward green goals. The company, formerly Meeting Strategies Worldwide, is working to establish “Eco-Event Zones” – connecting different groups that are meeting in the same destination to improve leverage when asking for green initiatives.

“Potentially more buying power or influence happens when more than one group is involved,” says Amy Spatrisano, CMP, principal with MeetGreen. For example, when the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), a client of MeetGreen, was planning an event in Salt Lake City, the company suggested they partner with Meeting Planners International, which was visiting Salt Lake City just a few weeks later, to advocate for commercial composting in Salt Lake City.
“Salt Lake really stepped up and went from a 4 percent recycling (diversion) rate to 50 percent in the week of the UUA General Assembly,” Spatrisano says, adding that the combined buying power of the two groups also caught the notice of city officials. “They had previously not considered how commercial composting might better position their city to host events and improve diversion for businesses already using compostable food service ware, like the Salt Palace,” she says.

While MeetGreen is working to find synergistic relationships for their clients, Spatrisano says planners can try to track down other like-minded groups either by joining the Green Meeting Industry Council and posting event dates, or asking the local CVB for a list of groups to contact.

4. STATE MANDATE DRIVES FLORIDA GREENING
While about 17 states have launched some sort of environmental improvement program for the lodging and restaurant industries, hotels in Florida have jumped to the forefront. In the past year, the number of hotels designated by the Florida Green Lodging Program for best practices in water, energy and waste efficiency standards, has nearly tripled – to more than 540 properties. That could be due, in part, to new state government regulations requiring that all state agencies and departments contract for meeting and conference space only with hotels or conference facilities that have received the Green Lodging designation, unless no other viable alternative exists.

“Requiring state meetings and conferences to be contracted at designated Florida Green Lodging Program properties created an incentive for properties to adopt the necessary green practices to become program members,” says Amy Graham, public information officer for the Florida DEP. That’s good news for eco-minded planners; with the number of properties, convention centers and restaurants designated green growing daily, it should be getting easier and easier to meet sustainably in Florida.

5. GUIDELINES FOR SUSTAINABLE CONFABS
Planners may soon have a definitive resource for all things green in The Green Meetings & Events Practice Panel. Put together by the Convention Industry Council’s APEX Accepted Practices Exchange, the GMEPP has been relying on an army of volunteers to pull together a definition of a green meeting with steps, checklists and measurable goals. By the end of the year, the panel expects to introduce standards that any planner can use to evaluate the sustainability of an event.

Anyone can comment on the work of the APEX GMEPP through live meetings at City Discussion Groups held at venues around the world or through an online Virtual Discussion Group. For more information, or to participate in a discussion group, visit apexsolution.org/green.htm.