Greening your events

These days, we’re all trying to make our meetings and events more sustainable. But deciding what to do can be difficult.

Where should you start? What should you do? How do you know if you’ve made an impact?

We’ve put together some basic guiding principles to help you get going based on our own experience.

Online or on location?

Ask yourself if meeting face-to-face is necessary. Could you host a teleconference instead? We often organise webinars to train our projects or stream our larger events online so that participants don’t have to travel.

If you have to go on location, then make sure your venue is easy to get to by public transport or low-carbon transport options.

Choose green suppliers

Include sustainability in your procurement of external services. Make sure your suppliers:

• Serve fresh, organic and locally sourced food
• Have a food waste prevention strategy
• Use reusable and recyclable containers
• Make an effort to save electricity, water and reduce their CO2 emissions

Miia Itänen, our Communication Officer responsible for events, explained that ‘in our tender documents we always ask venues and suppliers to make sure that the event has the lowest environmental impact possible’.

At 'Europe let’s cooperate 2019', food was cooked on the spot to reduce the amount of food used.

Small changes do make a difference

Your event logistics should be green too:

• Try a paperless event (we always put everything online)
• Choose recycled materials or reuse old materials
• Avoid promotional gifts

For anyone who’s been to more than one of our events, it’s clear that we reuse our decorations. We've had the catch box and cardboard chairs since 2015!

Ask your participants for help

You can’t do it all on your own. Give your participants some tips on being green like reusing their hotel towel or bringing a reusable bottle of water.

Download our green checklist for more tips and tricks.

What about your project?

We want to hear from you! Let us know how you are making your project events greener. Contact your communication officer with your stories.

More information

• Download the United Nations' green meeting guide
• Become a partner and EU Green Week
• Sign up for the EU Sustainable Energy Week