Congress presence under the sustainability spotlight
After two years of cancellations and virtual events, Santen and many of our customers are excited by the return of face-to-face experiences we took for granted at medical congresses and events before the pandemic. However, the environmental impact of bringing thousands of people together to provide an experience around the latest innovations is especially present in our minds as we play our part in moving towards carbon zero.
The European Glaucoma Society congress (EGS) in Athens was a big focus for us, but our events team run by Laura Barton led us to do things differently – here are four ways we have adapted our activity to reduce our environmental impact:
Measuring our impact: For the first time we have measured the environmental impact of our presence at EGS. As detailed below, we made efforts to reduce the impact, but it’s critical to benchmark and to understand which elements create the most CO2 and which need the most attention. Undoubtedly travel is by far the worst culprit, followed by accommodation, catering and transportation of exhibition booth and materials. We now know that per person on-site, 1.72 tonnes of CO2 were produced. This is the equivalent to driving approximately 8,500 km in a petrol family car, per person.1 Simply being aware of this will help push everyone at Santen to seek alternatives to achieve our goals with a lower environmental impact.
Reduce travel: Air travel is by far the most environmentally damaging aspect of congress presence with our calculations showing a large proportion of the CO2 produced by Santen’s EGS activity came from travel. We now prioritise particular events and rationalise the attendance by our team in line with the desires of clinicians from EMEA countries who are also being more selective. We’ve all learnt that remote access to many events meets most of our needs and has various benefits including reduced environmental impact, whereas we must be physically present at others. We hope more organisations will adopt a hybrid approach in time, so we have the choice to reduce air travel.
Since this congress destination had limited alternatives to air travel, we incorporated offsetting using a My Climate project that provides clean drinking water to schools in Uganda. This scheme addresses a number of Sustainable Development Goals including ‘Good health and wellbeing’ and ‘Climate action’ since CO2 emissions are reduced through lowering the use of non-renewable firewood and charcoal.
We understand the shortcomings of merely offsetting our carbon footprint so are working on better solutions to reduce our impact rather than compensate for it, as per the below ‘greenhouse gas mitigation strategy’2
Attendees were asked to choose travel with lower carbon footprint where available – to reduce/eliminate first, compensate second. For future events we plan to collaborate with the congress organisations to appoint host destinations that are better connected by non-air travel.
To reduce the impact of local travel we chose hotels with immediate access to metro stations and looked to use local suppliers for the same reason. We hoped to select hotels that had active environmental policies but so far these are very few. Running a big event in Greece has its own challenges – Athens is somewhat behind, for example, London or Copenhagen, in terms of environmental awareness but we know that creating the demand increases awareness and promotes the supply, so we are confident our approach is worthwhile.
Booth build with a conscience: Gone are the days when exhibition booths were ‘single use’! We chose a builder that has a zero-waste policy. This means the materials such as aluminium, plywood, MDF and timber flooring are from previously used stock and will be reused. Items built especially for this event will be reused where possible or recycled, for example into heating pellets. All AV, electrical, lighting and furniture will be repaired if needed and returned to stock for re-use.
We understand that great collaboration with all our valued stakeholders is critical to moving towards a totally sustainable congress presence – and there is still work to be done to help the industry move in the right direction. This time, it was not possible for all required materials to be provided by the locally appointed production service providers, so instead we used booth builders from Poland. The materials were sourced as locally as possible to the build location then transported on one truck to Athens rather than several trucks from various locations. However, our calculations show that using a local booth builder would significantly reduce our impact so we will work with the congress bureau to overcome these challenges for future events.
This year our booth was more digital than ever, and we used innovative lighting and digital displays to vary the look and feel from one day to the next in line with the messages we want to convey. We didn’t use any foamcore signage, where printed signage was necessary, it was generic so it can be re-used. Printed handouts are now very limited – we prefer to maximise tablet use and send information electronically as a follow–up that can be better tailored to the delegate’s requirements. Similarly, we now provide delegate information and registration digitally using event apps and tablets.
Food and beverage choices: We estimate more than 2200 meals were consumed by our customers and staff while in Athens, making catering a worthwhile area of focus.
In recent years we have been uncomfortable about waste produced by catering at conferences – for example, numerous packed lunches with individually wrapped foods – but having an influence is very difficult; we are one small voice among hundreds, even thousands, of event sponsors that venues deal with. Excess packaging is a major concern, but the biggest environmental cost is the waste of the food itself and this is something we need to work on.
In terms of menu choices for a lower impact, we secured sponsorship of the congress lunch boxes on the day of our symposium. We were the only sponsor to request a wholly plant-based menu. We also worked with the local non-profit organisation, Boroume, to ensure left-over packed lunches were provided to those in need.
In summary, we know we’re only at the start of the journey but showing the effort that is being made really puts the issues and impact into the consciousness of everyone involved and we hope creates an impetus for change towards net zero. And finally, well done to our Santen events team for taking the initiative to tackle this challenge and achieving some stand-out results!
References
1. CBS, Dutch National Statistics: https://www.climateneutralgroup.com/en/news/what-exactly-is-1-tonne-of-co2/. Last accessed September 2022
2. Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Hierarchy. Columbia University in the city of New York. https://sustainable.columbia.edu/content/greenhouse-gas-mitigation-hierarchy. Last accessed August 2022
Document number: NP-No product-EMEA-0196
Date of preparation: September 2022
