Archive for the ‘Sustainable Event Management’ Category
In partnership with Greensense, the Department of Sport & Recreation has just launched an industry resource to assist sport and recreation organisations, reduce their environmental impact and improve their sustainability.
The resource has come out of an Environmental Ethics Working Group that has run over the last 2 years with the WA Football Commission, Football West, Triathlon WA, Rowing WA, Surf Life Saving of WA and Royal Life Saving. The group was facilitated by the Department of Sport and Recreation and Greensense was engaged as the technical advisors.
The working group was formed to raise awareness of environmental issues and allowed each participant to share ideas on sustainability initiatives they were implementing, learn from each others experiences and ensure that the sport and recreation industry continues to take a lead role in the community, by providing and promoting environmentally sound practices.
While the resource has been targeted at the sport and recreation industry it clearly provides value to many organisation and we would encourage our clients to take and look and see if it can be used for you own purposes. As well as a general introduction to the issues facing us around climate change, energy, water, waste and biodiversity the resource provides very practical recommendations on what your organisation can do to respond to these challenges with supporting tools, templates and documents to help you get started.
The Environmental Sustainability Pack was launched by the Minister for Sport and Recreation, Terry Waldon MLA, with presentations from yours truly, West Coast Eagle player Sam Butler and a panel of some of the working group members. As part of the presentation the Minister announced funding of $200,000 over 2 years to support sport and recreation organisations progress their sustainability initiatives.
At Greensense we value the opportunity to be involved in sustainability projects that deliver real outcomes as the success of this project has exemplified. If you would like our help in finding innovative ways to improve the sustainability of your organisation then make sure you get in touch.
Last week we started using Twitter so now you can follow us here: @GreensenseView. That means there are now three ways to stay in touch. The Greensense blog, the Greensense Newsletter, and now Greenense on Twitter.
One of the things we tweeted about this week was the Perth2011 suppliers lunch (#perth2011 hashtag on Twitter). Derek gave a brief presentation on the approach the event is taking to sustainability (tweet) and, later out on the water, a couple of the French sailors gave us a close-up look at their 49er (tweet). This is going to be an awesome event next year, so even if you aren’t interested in sailing, you should get involved.
And, if you’re on Twitter then follow us, and if you tweet on sustainability, climate change, or energy efficiency then let us know, and we’ll definitely follow you!
We blogged recently on the launch of Melbourne’s bike share scheme.
As it happens I’m over in Melbourne at the moment for the 2010 Carbon Expo. It’s my first trip and, I must say, it’s a cool town. I was particularly impressed to walk out of my hotel and almost immediately stumble across one of the bike stations for the new scheme.
The concept has been working well in other places around the world — Paris and Montreal have had successful schemes for a while (once the Parisians had stopped stealing the bikes) and London has also recently launched its own version, sponsored by Barclays bank — so a bike share scheme should work well in Melbourne, right?
Wrong.
Ok, sure, the cycle network is pretty good; the city is high density with everything pretty close to everything else; even the weather tries to help out, afterall cool and grey is perfect for cycling. So the ingredients are there, but none of these pros can outweigh a big a very obvious con. Victoria, like the rest of Australia, is a nanny state. In particular, you’re required by law to wear a cycling helmet when you jump on a bike, and they’re not kidding either.
Only moments after finding the bike station I spotted my first actual user — a middle aged chap proudly peddling alongside the Yarra astride his bright blue share bike. ‘Wow’, I thought, ‘This really works and people are actually using these bikes’. But disaster was only moments away. Unfortunately, our eco conscious bike sharer was not wearing a helmet and even more unfortunately three female police officers, also on bikes as it happens, were peddling in the opposite direction. You can guess what happened next. I stood and watched, fascinated, as our three cycling crime fighters wrote this poor guy a ticket for $150 (yup, I looked it up). I don’t think we’ll see him back on one of those bikes any time soon.
Now I understand that rules are rules, but that little exchange struck me as totally absurd. Bike share schemes are presumably not targeted at regular cyclists. These folks will already already have their own bike, helmet and (for the hardcore) lashings of lycra. Instead, they’re aimed at people who may occasionally want to use a bike to get from A to B, or for that spur of the moment trip when you decide to jump on a bike instead of walk or take public transport, or maybe for those tourists whos feet are getting tired.
So what do all our would-be bike sharers have in common? Well one thing is for sure, they don’t spend their day carrying around a bike helmet on the off chance that they might jump on a share bike at some point!
I’m not the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous situation. A quick search on google revealed a number of articles and blog posts on the topic — here’s one from The Age back in July.
So what can we learn from Melbourne’s experience? Well firstly that we need to lighted up. All of the most popular cycling cities in the world allow you to ride a bike without wearing a helmet. They manage to achieve this with a decrease in the number of injuries per km cycled compared to Australia. Secondly, it’s vital that councils do everything they can to ensure citizens adopt these great initiatives. There’s no point trying something like bike sharing if potential users have very compelling reasons to stay away. These issues need to be identified upfront and addressed before you launch your project. In this particular instance I understand the Victorian government is coming under considerable pressure to adapt council by-laws within the CBD that will provide an exemption for bike share users. I, for one, hope that this happens and happens quickly.
On Thursday, May 6, Professor Sackett, the Chief Scientist for Australia, presented at the Sir Mark Oliphant CleanTech conference dinner, hosted at the MCG, on the topic of Green Sport.
In referring to some of the great moments in sport she said “with every one of these moments in our sporting history has come emissions of carbon, in the form of CO2 and soot, the same substances that are directly or indirectly risking tennis players fainting at the Australian open as they fight through our hottest summers yet, Olympic athletes to wheeze as they run through poor air quality in Beijing, and contributing to drought in areas where athletes need fields to train.”
Professor Sackett went on to say that “sport is, without a doubt, a crucial part of the Australian cultural fabric” and at Greensense we believe it is an industry that through it’s leadership has the ability to educate and influence a nation to more sustainable living. We are already engaged with the WA Football Commission, Triathlon WA, Perth 2011 and the Drug Aware Pro, some of WA’s leading sporting groups, to help them become leaders in sustainable events and operations. We are working with them on everything from sustainable event management, education and awareness, energy efficient buildings and organising green team initiatives.
The key things Professor Sackett suggested a sporting event must take into account are:
– the greenhouse costs of building the stadium or venue,
– the transportation of tens of thousands of spectators,
– stadium lighting
– and even the cost of old Bob sitting at home watching the game on his voracious plasma TV.
A key suggestion related to transportation as one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions, where encouraging and subsidising public transport would assist in reducing the number of cars on the road and CO2 in the air. Another key area is development in sustainable architecture. According to research conducted by CSIRO, energy use in buildings accounts for 26 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
We’re already working with some of Western Australian’s top sporting events to help make sport more sustainable, including the Perth 2011 Sailing Regatta, Drug Aware Pro, TriWA and the Bussleton Half-Ironman, and, the Western Australian Football Commission.
We’re passionate about Sustainable Sport. We’d love to help you make your sport or sporting event more sustainable. You can read more about our sustainable event management services or contact us for more information.
Most people in Perth are aware that Fremantle was selected to host the 2011 ISAF Sailing World Championships. This is exciting news for Perth, with it set to be the biggest sailing event to hit our shores since the 1987 America’s Cup Defence.
Just as exciting for Greensense, is that fact that we will be involved in helping to make this event as environmentally responsible as possible through a partnership announced this month (read the press release here). We will be assisting with the development and monitoring of their Environmental and Sustainability Programme and will report on various aspects of the event such as energy use, waste management and recycling and carbon emissions.
With over 18 months still to go before the event, it’s great to see that the event organisers have recognised the value of the environment to the community early in the planning process to enable robust plans to be put in place and meaningful relationships to be developed, ensuring the best possible outcomes between now and December 2011.
Here’s to sustainable sport and a sustainable world championships in Perth!
Greensense are proud to announce that we are again partnering with the Drug Aware Pro surf comp in Margaret River.
Last year we joined the event to complete a sustainability audit and we made recommendations for improving the sustainability of future events.
This year, not only are we completing another audit, but we’re also helping the comp to implement a number of initiatives and recommendations from last year to reduce the event’s environmental impact.
The first step this year was to develop a Sustainability Policy to guide the decision making process. From there, the Drug Aware Pro have implemented improved waste and recycling initiatives, are offsetting competitors travel, are encouraging carpooling, and are working with suppliers and sponsors to green the supply chain.
This is such a great example of what Sustainable Event Management is all about: making a commitment, recognising the impact, making changes and improving year on year.
If you’re going to be at Surfers Point for the weekend, look out for the Greensense folk and come and say Hi!
Earlier this month, Pete and I took a team to Southbound as part of Greensense’s ongoing partnership with Sunset Events as their sustainability auditor. For any who don’t know, Southbound is one of Western Australia’s largest and most iconic music festivals. Held in Busselton, three hours south from Perth, it attracts over 20, 000 people over the weekend.
Our role at an event like Southbound is to work with the team at Sunset Events, as well as the large number of suppliers to the festival, to understand exactly what goes into putting on an event of this type and size, and importantly, the associated impacts of these activities in terms of energy and water consumption, waste management and carbon emissions.
During the festival itself, we were out and about surveying festival goers to understand how they travelled to Southbound as well as checking out Southbound’s other green initiatives. This helps us understand how well (or not) these ideas actually work in reality and means we can make recommendations on how to reduce the impact of future events.
One of the most positive things for us was to see FestivalBudi in action for the first time in Australia: Acting on a recommendation from a previous Greensense sustainability audit, Southbound promoted the use of FestivalBudi (part of Liftshare) as a means of putting travellers in touch with each other to encourage carpooling to festival. While we were surveying, we came across a few people who had used it and everyone thought it was a great idea to save money, meet new people and do their bit for the environment.
To top it all off, when we weren’t surveying festival goers, counting cars in the carpark or chatting with the stall holders, we still managed to see some great bands and have a dance in the silent disco — what a great start to the year!
Greensense is pleased to announce a partnership with Triathlon Western Australia (TWA). This exciting project will see Greensense and TWA working together to raise awareness and increase education about environmental sustainability and will endeavour to foster sustainable values and principles to all staff, volunteers, members, participants and other stakeholders involved in the sport of triathlon.
Sport is an integral part of the Australian way of life and represents an amazing opportunity to reach large numbers of people in a relaxed atmosphere. TWA and Greensense will be working together to set long term goals and implement the means to track their progress. This will include conducting a sustainability audit for the Busselton Half Ironman Triathlon in May 2010.
TWA is showing great leadership in the space of sustainable sports event management, a concept that is continuing to gain momentum in Perth.
To read the press release, click here.
Greensense has signed a three year arrangement with Sunset Events as their sustainability auditor.
Things kick off this weekend with One Movement. Greensense Managing Director, Derek Gerrard, will be in action during the One Movement Independent Times Conference as a guest speaker. He will be part of a panel looking at Environmental Sustainability and the Music Industry — Can a Song change the world.
Also — keep an eye out for the Greensense crew who will be collecting travel data from 2-5pm each day — come over and say Hi if you see us.
This year, Greensense have partnered with Spring in the Valley to measure the environmental impact associated with the festival and make recommendations for future years. This is a great initiative and shows that the event organisers and participants recognise the value of the environment to the community in social, environmental and economic terms and are keen to ensure its longevity.
Today, Greensense attended the media launch of the Festival and met a number of the people involved in making the festival the successful, iconic event we know it as today. The launch celebrated the aboriginal heritage of the region with some entertainment and bush tucker, complemented with some of the region’s wine’s.
Our audit will measure resource usage and emissions associated with transport, food and drink, electricity usage and waste and recycling. Following the festival, the report will be made available here.
Sport contributes a significant part to the social fabric of most nations in the world. The UN Sports and Environment program makes it clear that when a person engages in sport there is an obvious impact on the environment. Perhaps that is an obvious statement, particularly when you mix the catering, accommodation, sanitation, transport and merchandising needs of the athletes, spectators, officials, media and sponsors, with the manufacturing and maintenance of the sporting equipment, facilities and infrastructure, with the ecosystems, waste, pollution, water, energy and other resources that they all impact. But the real question is how can we make sport more sustainable?
Greensense partnered with Surfing WA and the Drug Aware Pro earlier this year to help undertake a carbon audit for WA’s premier sporting event. Subsequently we are working with the Department of Sport and Recreation in WA to discuss more broadly, with leading sporting bodies, how the industry can reduce it’s impact on the environment — so thought it was a timely opportunity to write about it. I think this blog we’ll just focus on some of the great initiatives that have been put in place around the world — wet your appetite and hopefully spark some ideas for your sport and then follow that up later with some of our ideas on what you can do.
The Beijing Olympics had a theme of “The Green Olympics”. They made a number of pre-Olympic commitments around air quality, emissions from vehicles and cleaner energy. On the whole this was well achieved but a common comment is this could have been improved with more transparency on the reporting and data verification of the outcome — just showing how stakeholder engagement is critical. The London Olympics are following this up with their “towards one planet” theme and have implemented an extensive sustainability policy focused on climate change, waste, inclusion and biodiversity. The London Olympics has also committed to running this process following the British Standard 8901 — one of only a few standards for sustainable event management.
The 2008 US Tennis Open implemented a range of “green initiatives” and engaged well with their suppliers to do this.Evian provided recycling on site for 500,000 plastic bottles and 20,000 aluminum cans. Constellation Energy provided renewable energy. Lexus provided 20% of the players vehicles as hybrids. Wilson recycled 20,000 ball cans and 60,000 balls and IBM reduced the number of servers it used to keep score from 60 to 9.
The 2006 FIFA World Cup implemented it’s “Green Gold” initiative. They had 4 environmental targets for water, refuse, energy and mobility. As a result emissions from energy dropped from an estimated 7500 tonnes to 2500 tonnes and trasnport emissions from 90,000 tonnes to 73,000 tonnes.
The 2010 Vancouver Olympics has a number of initiatives underway but some that we like revolve around the venue management. They have reduced their site footprint by 30% from the original design, ensured that wood waste from construction has been re-used for compost, implemented an onsite waste water treatment plant and obtained LEED Silver green building certification for all new buildings.
The last example is a favourite — mostly because of the collaborative nature between the events. The FIVB Swatch Beach Volleyball Championships and the Allianz Swiss ATP Tennis event have different organisers for each event but collaborate on sharing the same temporary location. Once the tennis is finished the courts are filled with sand for the volleyball so the spectator seating and infrastructure can be re-used among other things. They also used renewable energy from 1to1 Energy which just happens to come from solar panels installed on the local football stadium — cool!
If you are involved in running a sporting event and this has sparked some ideas for you — we would love to have a chat to look at how you can make your event more sustainable.
A client recently asked me if using recycled paper and vegetable-based inks, really does make a difference to the environment. This question often comes up after a carbon inventory highlights the embedded energy and associated CO2e emissions in print materials, be it regular office paper or professional print jobs.
While my immediate response was “yes, recycled paper is less resource-intensive than using virgin forest”, I thought I would research this to see how the difference could be quantified.
Recycled paper
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, producing one tonne of recycled paper saves an alarming:
- 31,780 litres of water;
- 4100 kilowatt/hours of electricity;
- 75 per cent of chlorinated bleach;
- 27 kilograms of air pollutants;
- 13 trees;
- 4 cubic metres of landfill; and
- 2.5 barrels of oil
The ACF also lists a number of Australian producers or stockists with office quality recycled paper. If you’re not already using recycled paper, you should look at the Little Paper Book.
Vegetable-based inks
So what about vegetable-based inks? Inks are made using a liquid base, and then adding a pigment and a bonding agent. It is the choice between a petroleum or vegetable base that is key here.
Petroleum based inks are less than ideal for a number of reasons:
- They continue our reliance on crude oil, a non-renewable resource
- Petrol and alcohol evaporate during the printing process, releasing Volatile Organic Compound (VOCs) and affecting air quality
- A harsh solvent is needed to clean printers which have used these inks, resulting in more VOCs
- Petroleum based inks are difficult to remove during recycling and results in a toxic waste product.
Alternatively, vegetable based inks are derived from renewable sources such as corn, linseed, canola etc. There are no VOCs released during its use or cleanup and no toxic waste is produced during recycling. More information on inks can be found here.
For those people and offices already using recycled paper and vegetable-based inks – well done. I hope this blog has hopefully provided some new information to support your decision. For those not using them, I would urge you to consider it. The statistics above are alarming and as the quality of recycled paper increases, it is difficult to see any reasons why you shouldn’t make the switch.
Clif and I recently attended the Carbon Trading Summit, which was presented by the Alliance of Industry Associations.
We were there to create a carbon inventory for the event — sustainable event management is one of the services Greensense offer — but we also enjoyed the presentations. There were seven speakers at the event, faciliated by the always engaging Gerry Gannon.
Tony Owen spoke first, a professor of economics at Curtin University. Tony explained the economic logic of an emissions trading scheme and a carbon tax. They both increase the direct costs incurred by consumers and businesses when they consume goods and services that generate greenhouse gases. This creates an incentive to make investments to reduce emissions. He suggested that, technically, they both had exactly the same effect and that he preferred a carbon tax over an emissions trading scheme.
He also decided to ridicule carbon labeling as promoted by Tesco’s. He suggested that if the cost of carbon is internalised into the price of a product, then that is sufficient to inform consumer choice. I disagree. The choice to buy one product over another is not a purely economic question. It is also a question of values.
Bruce Robinson spoke next on the topic of peak oil. Bruce is the convenor of ASPO Australia, the association for the study of peak oil. Peak oil is the point in time when the extraction of oil and gas peaks and, without sufficient preparation, there is a risk of social and economic breakdown.
Bruce took a number of opportunities to poke fun at economists who, he suggested, falsely believe that ever increasing demand will ensure ever increasing supply. Later, during the panel session, it was clear that Tony Owen, the resident economist was not a believer in peak oil.
The next speaker was Tim Shanahan, the Director of the Energy and Minerals Initiative at UWA. Tim began his presentation by showing the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth (embedded below), reminding us that climate change is a moral issue, not an economic one.
Tim spent some of his presentation talking about the research UWA is doing into geothermal energy. Rather than generating electricity, UWA is looking at using hydrothermal energy (i.e. warm water) with a heat exchanger to provide cooling or heating. This means that, while beneficial for the environment, the technology won’t attract renewable energy certificates, a good example of how Government policy doesn’t always provide the right incentives.
I’ll continue writing about the event in my next post.
Greensense recently attended the Sustainable Living Festival, held in Melbourne from February 20–22, and participated in the Key Forum on Sustainable Events. The Forum featured national and international speakers sharing their successes in reducing the carbon footprint of their events, principally through travel, waste and water management and recycling, venue choice, compostable toilets and ticketing systems.
The Festival featured many public and industry specific forums and over 120 exhibitors promoting environmentally friendly products and services. The Festival also launched a DVD ‘The Summer of Sustainablity’ featuring five major music festivals and their actions on environmental issues.
