Sustainability is not just about the broader issues of being green, watching your carbon offset and recycling. It’s not even about being socially sensitive. It’s about changing the way companies can appeal to their clients and those whose lives they affect with innovative initiatives, engaging and bringing benefit to their surrounding communities, and creating a greener and more environmentally-friendly approach to business.
EW looks at what we can do to make our businesses leaner, cleaner and greener, and how we can give more back to the industries we serve. Despite adherence to standards, optimisation of procedure and certification, sustainability is ultimately about using our imagination.
Last year Amsterdam RAI won the first ever UFI Sustainability award. According to RAI’s director of exhibitions Ids Boersma, true social responsibility and sustainable development starts with a vision and a passion for making the world a better place to do business.
“We need to be socially responsible,” says Boersma. “From the venue operating angle, especially on the conference side, we have already seen the organiser asking us for our social responsibility programme, or asking how sustainable we were. I have to be honest about it, those were US companies, and often strongly governmentally involved.
“We monitored it, steered, defined, got frustrated, redefined again, set targets again. We tried to involve our people and in the end we won a prize.”
As for how the RAI won its prize, Boersma says success didn’t come overnight. “We started working towards it in 2008, setting clear goals, targets in various fields, whether it is energy, waste reduction, water usage, or charity and diversity.
“For a venue it seems slightly easier – there are a lot of invisible things that people don’t see but that we still do. We generate power and use the heat that comes out of it. We changed all our light bulbs, replacing more than 10,000 [strip lights] because that saves energy. We serve healthy food. All our coffee is organic. There is a long list of things you can do as a venue operator.”
Rashid Toefy, CEO of the Cape Town Convention Centre, believes things are actually more difficult for venues than organisers.
“All [venues] are doing is dealing with [organisers’] waste, so if they can bring less waste, less packaging, then I can hit my targets of less waste-to-landfill,” he says. “At the moment I have only 25 per cent of my waste recycled while the rest goes to landfill. I can’t do much more unless organisers bring less of the stuff.”
Toefy says sustainability, as well as winning confidence over others who don’t harness it, is an absolute competitive advantage and an essential part of the financial bottom line of your company.
“I think if you ignore it, you do so at your peril,” he comments. “Believe it or not we don’t have a budget for sustainability, because it makes money.”
He claims the company cut its electricity bill by 10 per cent by implementing green technology, amounting to millions of Euros a year. “The electricity saving paid for the cost of the new lights that we’ve put in,” he says.
The cost of success
“As an exhibition organiser,” recounts Boersma,
“I find it more difficult to meet the demands of customers to provide green solutions. It should come back in the content of one’s show. One typical example of what we did was to promote the use of public transportation for people visiting our shows.”
According to Boersma, this public transport initiative exemplifies the business benefit being sustainable can bring. RAI’s initiative meant that for €€7.50, visitors could travel to Amsterdam and back. “In Holland that is quite a good deal, I can tell you,” said Boersma.
“We invested in having people come to the shows by public transport. Then we researched that and saw that we brought more people to the show because of that alliance we had with public transportation providers.
“That was a cost, but it paid back.”
UBM Asia’s executive VP Michael Duck claims the company culture must be changed from the top down. UBM’s ‘NGO’ event series, which began life in Brazil, engages communities in regards to venues, freight forwarders, stand contractors, and government, on how to get people in the corporate social responsibility arena to meet with the country’s Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs).
“The idea and the plan is to work with these communities in terms of giving something back,” says Duck. “The venue gives itself for free. The stand contractors give the stand for free, in terms of building them. The marketing, and the floorplans and also the promotional elements are given by our company and we bring these communities together. We harness these commercial resources.”
UBM now has three NGO events in Brazil and two in London, where it is called Responsible Business. It also had an event in India last year. The company has also started a new responsible business event in the US called Business For Better, held in San Francisco.
“Major companies have whole departments looking at how they deal with the awarding of monies to various NGOs,” continues Duck. “The visitors that we have are people from the government and various NGOs that are not as exhibiting companies.
“There are no costs for the NGOs themselves. But they get to meet the people who can then understand what they’re trying to do.”
Summarising his approach to sustainability, Boersma says: “It’s a real journey to become more sustainable. It starts with a vision and a passion. You have to involve your people. You have to know that what you have done so far was just a small step, there’s still a giant leap to be made.”
- This was first published in the Issue 1/2013 of Exhibition World. Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
