5 Simple Ways To Green Your Meetings
-- Hotels, 2/18/2009 8:20:00 AM
Saint Charles, Missouri — FEBRUARY 17, 2009 — According to recent research, more than
two-thirds of meeting professionals take environmental considerations into account when planning their conferences. For those in the hospitality industry, this means that your green policies no longer can be limited to just guestrooms. Every facet of your operations — especially your meeting spaces — now must account for their environmental impact.
Marriott Hotels estimates that the average three-day meeting attended by 1,000 people produces more than 12 tons of trash, uses 200,000 kilowatts of power and consumes 100,000 gallons of water. Wastefulness on a group scale can be astounding.
Thankfully, Pineapple Hospitality — the premier distributor of Green Hotel Products & Marketing Programs for the Hospitality Industry — has top-of-mind Green Meetings awareness. Pineapple Hospitality has assembled an arsenal of green solutions and services proven to make your corporate events run more smoothly — while significantly reducing costs and conserving natural resources.
“Concerned about climate change, organizations are more aware than ever of the environmental impact of their meetings and travel,” says Ray Burger, President of Pineapple Hospitality. “For example, Florida recently declared that government officials must look for green hotels when organizing meetings. That’s just one of hundreds of such moves.
“Nowadays, it’s all about socially responsible travel,” Burger adds. That’s why it’s essential that lodging properties embrace Green Meetings programs now. They make perfect sense for hotels, guests and employees — not to mention our precious planet and future generations.”
5 Green Meeting Tips
To help gauge just how a hotel can “green” its meetings, Pineapple Hospitality spoke with Jeff Slye, founder of Business Evolution Consulting, a group of business professionals with expertise in guiding organizations to become eco-friendly while reducing costs and delivering high-quality services and products. While there’s almost no end to the steps you can take to reduce waste and offer groups Greener Meetings, Slye provided these 5 simple sustainable travel steps to help you get started:
1) Don't green if you aren't green: Only “green” your meeting if your hotel actually has an authentic and sincere environmental program. A hotel could do serious damage to its brand if it promotes Green Meetings while neglecting the rest of hotel's environmental impact. On the other hand, hotels should be proud to extend their environmental commitment into their meeting spaces and groups will appreciate it.
2) Add proper recycling bins (and train your staff!): This seems obvious, but there are still literally tens of thousands of meeting spaces where recycling bins are not available — or only a small box to recycle paper, tucked away in a corner. Remember: Outside of food and napkins, almost all meeting room waste is recyclable (paper, glass bottles, plastic bottles, etc.). Take the time to make several large bins available and add proper signage. This is a great opportunity to make your green side more visible to customers and employees and will highlight your commitment to reducing your meetings’ environmental impact. And when you recycle effectively, you also can decrease waste pick-up schedules and related costs.
3) Make bottled water by-request (ideally, eliminate it all together): Considering the large revenue source of bottled water, it is challenging to eliminate bottled water on site. However, for standard meetings where bottled water has not been requested, water should only be made available through pitchers and reusable glasses. Higher-end brands can spend more time on the preparation and presentation of food and beverages served at events and even use fruit-infused water if they’re concerned about this step.
4) Serve condiments in bulk: This is one of the easiest steps, delivers immediate cost savings and has significant environmental impact. Most hotels wonder why they didn't do this earlier. Use ramekins for bulk ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, sugar, and jams/jellies and track the results. The bottom line is significantly greener as well! Note: Some cities have health department regulations regarding this practice, so be sure to check prior to implementation.
5) Reduce paper (go and stay digital in your meetings; when needed, print double sided, only what is needed, on post-consumer recycled content paper): This might take a little creativity, but there are ways to reduce all of the binders and printed materials that are never used. Consider setting up binders by category/department/or group and only printing pages relevant to those individuals. Whenever printing, ensure all documents are printed double sided and use a minimum of 30% post-consumer recycled content paper. The ideal scenario is not to print anything and allow attendees to use laptops to access information and to take notes.
“These are some basic and easy steps to get you moving toward having more Green Meetings,” Slye says. “There are many more areas to address, such as energy and water conservation, to truly be dedicated to hosting Green meetings — but these 5 steps are a great start.”
Green Meetings in Practice
A number of hotels already have jumped on this trend and implemented significant Green Meeting programs. Marriott International unveiled a menu of eco-friendly Green Meeting products and services that will enable groups of all sizes to save water and energy, reduce waste and recycle during their stays. Some of the ways Marriott will be making meetings green include offering recycle bins in meeting rooms, using green products such as pens and notepads made from recycled material, decorating with organic flowers, linen-less tables, name tag reuse and donating leftover food.
“More and more, groups want to be ‘green,’” said David Marriott, Marriott International senior vice president of global sales, in a news release. “By joining us in our effort to protect endangered rainforest and host green meetings, they will be helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that impact our climate. Each year, rainforest destruction causes more carbon emissions than all of the world’s cars, trains, SUVs and trucks combined.”
Fairmont Hotel and Resorts launched an Eco-Meet program, now available at all of its properties.
Eco-Meet was developed as a Green Meeting and conference planning option. In this way, meeting planners can organize conferences and events that consider the environment, result in reduced waste, and also conserve valuable resources.
Eco-service provides "disposable-free" food-and-beverage services and recycling stations in the meeting rooms. This service is an important element to a greener meeting and, for example, includes china and cutlery used instead of disposal items, linen napkins instead of paper, and centerpieces that are edible/organic or made from reusable items such as silk flowers. White boards are used rather than paper flip charts. Find out more at www.fairmont.com/ecomeet.
About Pineapple Hospitality
Headquartered in Saint Charles, Missouri, Pineapple Hospitality™ is an EPA ENERGY STAR™ partner bringing fresh ideas to hospitality guests’ doors and owner/operators’ bottom lines — including FreshStay® (www.freshstay.com), EcoRooms & EcoSuites (www.EcoRooms.com) Environmentally Sensitive Amenities™, EO®, Neutrogena®, Earth Perfect and greenSPA™ amenities, AVIVA and WAVE dispensers, Energy Efficient Lighting and Controls, Custom Linen & Towel Re-Use Programs, Green Key Cards, Green Earth Key Cards, Energy Management Systems and Controls, High Performance showerheads, the Nature’s Mist™ deodorization system, Zero Odor, and dozens of other products and programs. For more information, please visit www.pineapplehospitality.net, or call us at 636-922-2285.
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