Director of Zentive Agency, Lee Hird, talks carbon calculation and why it doesn’t need to be a daunting concept.
Zentive Agency creates and delivers sustainable events that produce a positive social impact. It looks at every stage of the event management process with sustainability in mind, proactively making changes during the conception, planning, delivery, and review of an event to reduce emissions. At the helm of the agency is Director Lee Hird, who has a steadfast commitment to excellence in event management that’s defined by a unique blend of creativity and strategic planning.
Carbon measurement and the reduction of carbon is applied into the full event management process at Zentive right from the outset, as Lee explains: “We’ve produced and implemented sustainable event plans that help us to work with venues and suppliers to reduce carbon emissions by looking at their internal processes and supply chains to help us understand where the biggest opportunities are.
“We also put together a full carbon calculation for every event that we deliver.
Information is collected through the registration forms we build for clients and we work together with them, suppliers, venues, and local ground staff to collect the rest of the information to put together an accurate estimate of the event’s carbon emissions. This helps us look at the event in advance from a strategic point of view, asking what we can do to reduce emissions now and what we can put in place to make sure they’re not increasing any further.”
Energy, food and drink, waste management, event transport, and travel and accommodation are the five main areas in which the agency measures emissions, but they’re not all equal: “Travel has the biggest impact undoubtedly. One way to reduce this is by always having a virtual side of the event available. Our clients are now starting to host events where most attendees are based to not only cut emissions but to also cut cost. It’s also important to promote and encourage the use of public transport and don’t publicise parking at the venue.
“The second most impactful is food and beverages. We encourage clients to avoid red meat for their menus, opt for seasonal products, and we’re currently trying to have more events that are 100% vegetarian.”
A controversial topic in the sustainability world, Lee believes that offsetting emissions shouldn’t be done just for the sake of it: “What we don’t want to see is people hosting events with no strategical plan. If an event is producing waste, serving red meat, and everyone has flown business class but once it’s over, it’s offset and classed as a net zero event, that doesn’t solve any issues.
“Once we have the final carbon calculation, we work with clients to offset what we couldn’t reduce. We’re not just doing any event and offsetting everything that’s produced; we’re actively trying to reduce it to get emissions as low as possible. When it comes to offsetting, we choose a project within a location where the event has taken place so we’re giving back to the local community.”
Measuring emissions is often left until after the event, something which doesn’t always work in your favour: “You can miss seeing the small changes you can put in place that actually make a big difference. A lot of people think that to be sustainable, you need to spend a lot of time and money – you really don’t! It’s as simple as a question on a registration form.
Instead of delegates selecting vegetarian in the dietary section, offer veggie meals as standard. They can opt into a meat dish if they don’t want it, but you’ll instantly flip the 80% meat, 20% veggie around by making an event predominately vegetarian.”
Carbon calculation can seem a little daunting, but Lee stresses that you don’t have to do everything all at once: “Start with one little thing such as the amount of print materials being used, measure how much will be wasted and reused, then look at putting things into place to reduce that and start doing the same for other areas.
If you haven’t done carbon calculation before, there’s no harm in doing it post-event because you might not know what you’re going to predict. Once it’s over, you’ve got that benchmark that you can build on going forwards. You don’t have to jump into it head-first, just take steps and slowly work your way into it.
“We’re all in the early learning stages when it comes to sustainability but the more we share and come together collaboratively as an industry, the quicker we’re going to progress and see some real results.”