The tools exist for you to begin the journey toward sustainable events, according to industry experts in the sparsely attended Speed Seeds for Sustainability Workshop at IMEX - America’s Smart Monday. The session’s small crowd was disappointing in an industry that will face CSR head on in the very near future. (Yes, it’s not going away. Read MPI’s research at www.mpiweb.org/csr.)             

Katherine Manfredi introduced attendees to the so-called Three Musketeers of sustainable events: ISO 20121 framework for sustainable event process management, APEX/ASTM performance-based checklist and doing and GRI EOSS sector supplement for measurement and reporting. Planners and suppliers can use MPI’s Sustainable Events Management Tool to measure the success of their efforts (www.mpiweb.org/portal/csr/semttool).             

Due to the small size of the session’s audience, the planned presentation pleasantly evolved into a roundtable discussion among experts and delegates of common challenges—from getting a program started to green washing. Other discussions surrounded green audiovisual (with Midori Connelly of AVGirl), sustainable team building and sustainability missteps (John Chen of Geoteaming) and F&B (Mariela McIlwraith, CMM, of Meeting Change).