Syndication 
The Edmonton Convention Centre’s atrium is topped with Canada’s largest rooftop solar array.
A decade ago, RFPs that included questions about sustainability were “incredibly rare,” said Melissa Radu, the executive director of stewardship for Explore Edmonton, the Alberta, Canada, destination management and marketing organization (DMMO) that manages the Edmonton Convention Centre and Edmonton EXPO Centre. “The day the first RFP with a sustainability section hit my desk, I almost jumped up out of my seat,” Radu said during the PCMA Executive Leadership Institute webinar, “Sustainable Events in Action: Practical Strategies for Impactful Planning,” where she was a panelist on May 9. And now, she said, “I would say we see [sustainability questions included] in about one in five event [RFPs]. So that’s a really, really good gauge of how we’re moving the mark as an industry.”
Joining Radu on the panel were Virginie de Visscher, executive director of business events for Destination Canada, and Belinda Hanson, CMP, DES, senior director of operations and programs for the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). The conversation during the webinar, moderated by Marley Finnegan, founder of Purpose Sustainability Strategy and Purpose Net Zero, often turned to how planners can skillfully use RFPs to set and meet sustainability goals and successfully collaborate with venues.
Melissa Radu, executive director of stewardship, Explore Edmonton
RFPs are a first step in setting the foundation for a strong event sustainability action plan, Radu told Convene in a follow-up email. “They also are about setting expectations and understanding [a venue’s] reporting capabilities, which can help planners and organizations understand how they are performing related to their goals,” she said. “Most importantly, they help define roles.”
What’s important can vary from group to group, Hanson said in the webinar. But “whatever your priorities are, make sure you’re laying out what’s important to you from a sustainability standpoint and break that down into sections — location, venue, food and beverage,” she said. “Break it down so that it’s really easy to decipher what you want and what the destination has to offer — and how you can collaborate to make it all come together.”
Asking for what you want and “being very clear and detailed about your goals and what you would like the facility to do at the RFP stage is really helpful,” Radu said during the webinar. From the venue’s standpoint, “asking early makes it much easier for us.”
Asking About Energy
Energy makes up about 80 percent of the total carbon footprint of Explore Edmonton’s facilities, where carbon emissions have been reduced by 42 percent since 2018, Radu said. “So slashing energy use and practicing energy conservation from a venue standpoint is critically important.”
It’s important to ask in your RFP if a facility has an energy management program, as well as a carbon emissions reduction plan, Radu said. Research shows that somewhere between 16 to 20 percent of the energy use in a facility is a direct result of behavior, including powering off lights and equipment when not in use, she said. “Ask about energy-saving measures like LED lights, motion sensors for lighting, and things like dimming the lights during load in and load out.”
Belinda Hanson, CMP, DES, senior director of operations and programs, International Society of Computational Biology
For ISCB, “it’s all about carbon emissions,” Hanson said. “So we look at the venue itself — are they LEED certified? We ask about public transportation, where’s the airport in conjunction with the venue? Is there public transportation? How far are the hotels — can people walk so we don’t have to have additional transportation?”
And don’t be afraid to ask in your RFPs for the venue to provide documentation or for the destination to offer proof of their claims, panelists urged. “If you are asking about carbon-reduction targets, ask what frameworks those targets are aligned to,” Radu said. “An organization can send SOPs or copies of their policies to you want to check to make sure that what they are saying is true.”
Communicating About Managing Waste
One of the most important things to address, Radu said, is how to communicate about recycling and composting on-site, she said. International events bring people together from all over the world, from places where waste sorting happens a little bit differently, she added. “What is recyclable changes all around the world and in different jurisdictions.” You need to ask, she said, what can go into each compost or recycling stream in the destination and in the facility where your event is being held. At the Edmonton facilities, public-facing waste receptacles have been redesigned to include visuals as well as written labels to help users who may not speak English as a first language, Radu said. The images and information are supplied to event organizers in advance, “so that they can go into an exhibitor pack, they can go into a social media post or pre-event communication.”
The more that a venue or destination provides that kind of ready-to-use information — that “just shoots me those slides” — the more it means that her team doesn’t have to find the extra bandwidth to create it, said Hanson. She recalled putting out a “baby fire” at an event after she noticed complaints about food waste at lunch on social media. She had forgotten to include a slide explaining that the food was being served on compostable plates as part of a composting program at the facility, she said. “I will never forget those slides again.”
Questioning the Supply Chain
One set of questions that planners can add to RFPs focuses on a facility’s procurement practices and the guidelines they follow for materials that are brought into the facility, Radu said. Events, she said, “can be very, very material intensive. Far too often we don’t think about the full life cycle of the materials that we use, not just where it came from, but also where’s it going when we’re done using it.”
On the planner side, “I’d say make an event procurement plan and share it with everybody. Everybody who’s in your event supply chain, not just your facility, but your exhibitors, your suppliers, your on-site support — everyone — and do that early,” Radu said.
One of Hanson’s “favorite things to do” is to ask the venues and CVBs to supply her with a list of local vendors. “A lot of associations are locked into AV contracts for multiple years, where companies are trucking or flying in equipment across the globe,” she said. But “you have to look at that, too, when you’re talking about the cost. It’s not just the cost of working with XYZ vendor, it’s also about what that carbon footprint costs as well.” Her advice: Start small and start locally, or as close as you can, and then widen your circle from there, to figure out how you can break down those costs when you’re working with different suppliers.
Virginie de Visscher, executive director of business events, Destination Canada
Hanson also schedules extra time on site visits to go to all the hotels she’s considering for the room block and talk with them about such things as single-use plastic containers and their energy policies on temperatures in the rooms. “I’m taking an extra half-day stepping foot in each of those hotels and walking the walk and talking the talk, because sustainability is so important and your event is causing a schism in the biome that is that city,” she said. “When you’re bringing 2,000 or 3,000 people into an environment, you want to know what kind of impact that’s going to have,” she said. “So start the conversation early, return to the conversation often, and ask those hard questions.”
The most important question, said Destination Canada’s de Visscher, is one meeting professionals and organizations can ask themselves: Are you simply ticking items off on a checklist, “or does your organization really care — and is sustainability going to influence the decision?”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor at Convene.
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