Mr. Weissman

Eco-Friendly Practices

Greening Your Conference Center

By Arthur Weissman, President and CEO, Green Seal, Inc.

This article in our ongoing series addressing sustainability in different sectors of the lodging industry focuses on properties with conference centers. These are defined by the International Association of Conference Centers as properties where a minimum of 60% of total revenue from guest rooms, meeting space, food and beverage, conference technology (A/V), and conference services is conference-related.

We will look at those aspects of conference centers that have special opportunities and needs from the perspective of improving environmental sustainability. First we will discuss the institutional framework, then some substantive issues of particular importance to conference centers.

Institutional Framework

We encourage any property working on sustainability to form an internal committee across departmental lines. Conference centers have particular need of such coordination because they have more departments: in addition to housekeeping, engineering, sales and marketing, and purchasing, these include food and beverage, A/V and information technology, and conference services itself. Representatives of these departments should participate in a committee that meets regularly and guides all sustainability efforts throughout the conference center property under the aegis of the general manager.

The agenda of the committee should be to assess the current sustainability level of the property, identify needs for improvement, set priorities among them, develop an action plan, and implement and monitor improvements in the plan. The committee can be guided by existing literature, including guidances and standards, such as the Convention Industry Council's guidelines for green meetings in its "Green Meetings Report" of 2004; Green Seal's Greening Your Property; and its Environmental Standard for Lodging Properties, GS-33.

The committee should focus on areas that provide the greatest environmental benefit for the effort and cost. These may include product substitutions; changes in energy or water use; improved operations and facilities management; or recycling and waste handling. Priorities should be identified and work ordered accordingly. It is often best to begin with actions that are easiest to implement but have a significant result, such as certain purchasing changes, followed by significant actions that may involve more comprehensive or difficult changes, such as in operations or capital equipment.

We always encourage properties, particularly those with more complex organizations such as conference centers, to develop an action plan for becoming more sustainable. This doesn't have to be overly formal, but it should clearly delineate priorities, tasks, responsibilities, and milestones. The committee should oversee implementation of the action plan and monitor its progress and any follow-up.

Ultimately, the conference center may choose to bring in a third party to audit and/or certify the conference center as meeting leadership environmental levels. In this case, the committee becomes the conduit for whatever improvements are needed in preparation for, or in response to, the audit or certification. For instance, when Green Seal worked with Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Virginia, on its certification audit, its internal committee spent months developing and implementing a very detailed self-assessment and improvement plan prior to Green Seal's audit of the facility, and it dealt with any conforming changes needed for certification identified by the audit report.

Substantive Issues - The Easier Ones

There are a lot of sophisticated and even subtle environmental issues related to running a conference center, but let's just cut to some obvious ones that could help so much if followed:

Any veteran of conferences has probably sat through many where people feel like objects in a freezer, or else windows are opened in the middle of winter. This is obviously a waste of energy, as are the lighting and heating or cooling of unused conference space, which can be avoided simply and cheaply through occupancy sensors in each area. Paper embodies a lot of energy as well as precious natural fiber resources, so unused pads should be collected and reused, and only right sizes should be given to begin with (I still use some large pads given out for two-day conferences). While some users of conference services now demand recycling, a progressive conference center will routinely provide recycling bins for common materials that can be recycled in its area. Most conferences involve provision of food and beverages, and there are abundant opportunities to feed people more sustainably, starting with portion size and disposition of leftover or waste food.

Substantive Issues - The More Challenging Ones

Speaking of food, a conference center can make a significant statement - and have a positive environmental impact - by having the most appropriate foods and service choices. Offering organic and other sustainably grown foods, including free-range meats and eggs, sends a powerful message to an audience. Using service ware that is compostable, reusable, or recyclable, where the norm is disposable stuff such as polystyrene, demonstrates a further commitment. Additional savings can be achieved by reducing the incidence of single-portion containers for condiments and such.

The two media most widely used at conferences are paper and audio-visual equipment. Select paper that is high in post-consumer recycled content and has not been bleached with chlorine. Electronic equipment should be rated as energy-efficient, such as with an Energy Star(R) designation. Put notices on those LCDs to turn them off when not actually displaying slides in a presentation. As for the energy source itself, the conference center should try to purchase renewable sources where available from local utilities, or green tags (renewable energy credits) where not.

The conference center's largest use of electricity, however, is from lighting and air-conditioning. Replace, if necessary on a multi-year schedule, the lighting in your center if it is not energy-efficient, favoring the most efficient fluorescent lamps and luminaires. While this may involve substantial upfront cost, the return should be high and relatively quick (a few years). Considering the overall or life-cycle cost of lighting, the center definitely benefits from more efficient lighting equipment. So too with heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment; given the capital expense here, a decision has to be made about the useful life of existing equipment and environmental and financial benefits that could be gained by its replacement ahead of schedule.

Finally, the conference center must consider issues related to transportation - bringing people together from disparate places, and then sending them back after the event. The most important factor here is location of the center: its proximity to public transportation and major transportation hubs. Beyond that, the center can promote group transportation and use of public transportation modes. Some conferences try to "offset" the greenhouse gas emissions of participants' travel, and there is no reason conference centers could not offer this service generally. (The author prefers to have people limit unnecessary travel and resource use rather than think they are really offsetting or undoing their impacts, which is questionable and could also result in little regard for limiting one's impacts.)

Conclusion

Conference centers are by their nature resource-intensive, since they cater to large numbers of people who collectively require a large amount of basic and more advanced needs to be fulfilled. Thus, centers can be important levers to ensure that these needs are met in a more sustainable way. While environmentally conscious groups holding conferences, and a few conference planners, may already be requesting more sustainable conferences, the conference centers themselves can play a pivotal role in making these large group activities more sustainable by selecting the appropriate products and services and running their facilities in a more efficient and resourceful way. Planning and organizing is key to doing this because of the complexity of conference centers, and internal committees must set intelligent priorities to grapple with these issues. The results can be dramatic, though, in terms of the comfort and enhanced learning environment of the conference center as well as the financial benefit for the center and the environmental benefit for all.

Arthur B. Weissman, Ph.D., is President and CEO of Green Seal, Inc. He has experience in environmental science, policy, and standard-setting in public and private sectors. He has led the non-profit's resurgence as a force to make the economy more sustainable. He served as an international convener in developing the ISO 14000 standards for environmental labeling, and was the first Chair of the Global Ecolabeling Network. He has developed policy for the Superfund waste-cleanup program, served in the U.S. Senate as a Science Fellow, and worked for The Nature Conservancy. Mr. Weissman can be contacted at 202-872-6400 or aweissman@greenseal.org Extended Bio...

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