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Can Business Conferences Ever Be Green?
You might be able to conduct a videoconference with key business partners, but when it comes to meeting new contacts and picking up new ideas, real-life business conferences are difficult to beat. But if we are to continue to meet with our corporate peers in giant aircraft hangar scale conference centres, how do we reconcile that with the desire to limit our environmental footprint?
Douglas Sabo, worldwide director of corporate responsibility for security software vendor McAfee, recently attempted to take up that challenge for the company's sales kick off meeting in Las Vegas this year.
Sabo couldn't find any standard industry guidelines for greening an event, so the company's green team instead began investigating its own measures to curb the event's environmental impact. "We approached the event by putting it into different buckets," he explains. "We looked at travel, lodging rooms, meeting rooms, food and beverage, and conference materials." The team then identified areas of environmental impact and devised ways to mitigate them.
For example, Sabo claims the company implemented a range of measures that reduced the non-air travel carbon emissions for the 1,800-person event by 16 per cent and then offset the remaining 1,856 metric tonnes with carbon credits.
Environmentally speaking, though, people might be forgiven for thinking that selecting Las Vegas as the location for an event could undermine much of this good work. As a desert city, the resources required to keep it up and running must be bought in across vast distances, and its reputation for largesse and unnatural splendour accentuate the feeling that it exists in spite of its environment, rather than because of it.
The Federal government has warned that water could run out for the city by 2025. More recently, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said there was a 50 per cent chance that Lake Mead, which supplies Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego with water, could run dry by 2021. That would also have severe implications for hydroelectric generation.
Is a resort with half a million people -- 1.7 million if you count the wider metropolitan area -- living in the middle of the desert really a good place to hold a green conference? How can an event held in a place like this, that shoots fountains hundreds of feet into the desert air and creates lavish buffets with imported food -- be considered green?
"The greenest approach is simply not to have the event -- to just have a three-day webcast," accepts Sabo, arguing that there are different shades of green. "Part of the feel was that it's an entertainment destination, and that was an important aspect for the event." He adds that for software firms in particular networking events are essential, arguing that "as a software company it's often business travel and corporate events that matter more than the material issues that affect other manufacturers".
Viva Las Vegas?
Besides, things may not be as bad in Vegas as you think. The city has made great efforts to reduce its water consumption since a 2003 drought, and it ranks as the 26th most environmentally friendly of 72 cities according to a recent study conducted by the Earth Day Network. It may not be particularly high up the list, but there are 46 US cities
doing worse.
Ashley Katz, spokeswoman for the U.S. Green Building Council, has a positive view of the city. "Las Vegas is actually on the forefront of ensuring that the new projects that they have reduce their environment footprint," she says, adding that it has been instrumental in facilitating the development of LEED-certified buildings. "And there are some existing hotels that are going for LEED for their current buildings as well."
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