Event Industry News: Our team planned a big corporate conference at a beautiful event venue a few years ago. The event’s production was flawless, the energy on the floor was electric, and attendees were delighted. As the crowds began to disperse, we started our victory lap around the venue. We were met with a dismaying scene – lots and lots of waste. Unwanted giveaways, discarded paper programs, and plates of uneaten food from the catering service littered the event venue. The mission became apparent: how do we create extraordinary events that create lasting memories, not lasting negative impacts?
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This article was interesting because corporate events aren’t a sector of live entertainment that I often think about, but they have many of the same needs and issues that other live entertainment does. The issue discussed in this article of reducing waste after an event is also true across other areas of live entertainment. The question of how do we recycle the materials from a show after it closes is one that many a theatre has looked to answer. I got to hear a scenic designer speak about their work a few weeks ago and they talked about the life of the materials after the show being integral to their design process. They gave examples of asking local organizations what they needed and using those items as the basis for the materials in their design with the aim of 100% of the materials having a new life with that organization after the show closes.
I do think that this is cool, and hopefully will reduce waste during corporate events. However, I do think that in order to achieve something that resembles a “green” planet we need to cut one of the Ps. Profit. We have seen time and time again corporations hurting communities, people, and the planet for profit gains. That is simply how capitalism works. It wants to grow exponentially in a closed limited system. So even though it’s a good step, I think in order to get results, the profit part needs to go. For example:
saying that you’re going to include AI to something that is supposed to be “planet friendly” is a joke. AI and the demand for AI exponentially increases the use of energy and water. It uses millions of gallons of fresh water to cool down the servers running the AI. AI also is something that tends to take jobs away from real people, and because you don’t pay a machine to do the work that is putting profits instead of people. Saying your focus is “people, planet, profit” and then in the same breath making that whole slogan not have any meaning behind it is egregious, especially trying to pretend anything else.
Reading this article was immediately interesting to me because I value sustainability in all things that I do. I agree in their understanding that corporate events have a lot of necessity to them yet they generate a lot of waste by nature alone. I appreciate tha there are people who recognize this and are working actively against it to make a better corporate norm and method of doing these kinds of events. Prismm is doing good work in this field with their use of digital planning software. Testing out different situation and adjusting accordingly allows for waste to be cut. I think this is a great step forward in the production of huge corporate events. By digitizing a lot of aspects and using digital space to pre-visualize the event space and required resources, we can save a lot of mistakes, planning, and overestimating. I hope that this software becomes more widely used in all fields for preemptive countering of excess waste.
Event planning and corporate events are such a fascinating niche underneath the general live entertainment umbrella. I am definitely not jealous of the people responsible for planning and organizing these things, the amount of preparation needed in advance and the responsiveness to things going wrong make me truly in awe of the event planning industry. With that in mind, reading this article was super interesting. Sustainability in the general entertainment industry is already a challenging enough problem to tackle, and the challenge only becomes exponentially more difficult when you’re in a situation (like a large-scale corporate event) where things like brochures and food are expectations, and you can’t really get around needing a lot of those for everybody in attendance. Definitely the shift to using digital programs and apps for programs/brochures in replacement of paper ones helps with this, but in my personal experience, a lot of those apps are poorly designed and difficult to operate.
This article is very interesting coming from a theatrical perspective because many of these ideas could transfer over into the world of theater. Having the ability to test different scenarios of attendees could help us better manage the amount of waste caused by concessions. But the part of this article that really caught my eye was their suggestion to use digital signage. Advertising is such a large part of any event in which people are attending and from personal experience it can get thrown under the rug for someone to scrap together later. Bringing a more advocating view to signage and making the conscious decision to include sustainable practices in advertising is simple and effective. If you sit down and think about it, a corporate event shares many parallels with the theater industry because we're both trying to create an event unforgettable by the audience or attendees. So if they are able to rethink how to add more sustainable features in events we should be able to do so in our own line of work.
The environment should be important to all of us, but more often than not big corporate companies push aside being eco-friendly to increase profits, this can also show a lack of caring that can extend to the employees of these companies. Taking the environment into account when planning an event can be an amazing way to show how you as a company are compassionate. If more companies are willing to commit to having more environmentally conscious events it can be a good step into making a healthy relationship between the corporate world and the earth. Sustainability isn’t only good for the environment, it can make an event easier to plan. Many tools used to decrease the carbon footprint of an event are the same tools that can improve the efficiency of the event planning process. Tools like Digital Twins sound like the perfect aid for planning out events, having the ability to visualize the amount of space in a venue and how any tables and/or chairs that you plan to include to see if they will fit inside the venue's confines.
It think its really cool that there is an entire platform dedicated to simulating and computing how to best incorporate sustainable practices into event planning. However, I do think its really ironic that the platform is looking into introducing AI features to enhance its simulation abilities. AI is notoriously and undeniably terrible for the planet- the data centers used to run through the amount of information necessary to come to a conclusion require a huge amount of water to keep their electronics cooled. This water usage is ridiculously unsustainable and terrible for the planet- yet its being utilized to improve sustainability efforts? Not to mention one of the things AI would allegedly be used for is to determine "attendee engagement", which has next to nothing to do with sustainability and a lot to do with profit. Trying to balance both profit and sustainability is never going to lead to true sustainability, just some vain attempts at better resource management to make people think a difference is being made.
I love that this article is telling corporate events to think more on sustainability, giving a nice slogan of the three p’s and giving examples on how to go about it. I just wonder if there are more sustainable ways to go about making an event sustainable. As I was reading the article I thought, what if there was made to order food instead of large platters and buffets that all need to be thrown at the end of the night. Maybe there could be many more than one or two plant based options, vegetables, fruits, and crackers can go a long way as snacking foods throughout the venue, especially if events let patrons take the leftover food home, if that’s legally allowed. Reusable and local giveaways that are also useful to the everyday worker would better advertise since it is used more often and seen by more people. Having a stricter RSVP list and sticking to those numbers would save cost and waste by never ordering food for people who may or may not be coming.
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