Most people want to perform well at their jobs. It makes a difference in their paychecks, their futures, and their lives. But to make a difference in someone else’s life is important to many people, too. A meeting planner has the power not only to do that as an individual, but also as a professional. In fact, what a meeting planner does with just one meeting can make a huge impact on the community surrounding the event. This makes the concepts of “reduce, reuse, recycle” a critical component of his or her job.
The first step of this for meeting planners is reduce. This does not mean where can you cut corners, but where can you cut costs as well as waste. For instance, do the conference participants really need a plastic bag full of coupons for local restaurants and key chains with the event title on them? Probably not. Many conferences now use canvas bags, but they are slim and do not hold much. You might increase the sales of vendors who attend as well as provide a reusable resource by providing grocery-sized canvas bags. You could also eliminate any plastic gimmicky-looking doodads in favor of energy bars.

So what can you do to reuse? How about giving participants water bottles instead of bottled water? This alone can eliminate the waste of multiple plastic bottles per person. For instance, if you have 100 people attending and each person goes through two bottles of water per day, that’s 200 bottles you have to throw away. If there are multiple days for this conference, your contribution to the plastic waste alone is significant. Water bottles would eliminate almost all of this waste.

Want to eliminate the paper coffee cup waste? Encourage your key chain provider that plastic coffee cups with lids would be more effective promotions for his company. For people who drink soda, you could make arrangements with the conference center restaurant that people who use their conference water bottles or coffee cups would get a discount on the fountain drinks.

Recycle? Sure! Make arrangements with the conference center to have recycling stations–plastic, paper, aluminum, and glass if possible–scattered around the event. If you had three of these you could recycle a great deal and likely be able to afford to have an attendant help people separate things properly.

If you think the three Rs might be more expensive, crunch the numbers–you may be surprised. Also ask yourself if the community wants your 100 participants to dump their waste in the area landfills, keeping in mind how much image counts for these days. Then read Part 2 of “Meeting Planners Making a Difference.”