This text is part of the special Business Tourism booklet
It is not wrong to believe that an event held virtually has a lower carbon footprint than an event held in person. With the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses all over the world have had no choice but to turn to these. However, organizing a virtual event does not mean that it is 100% eco-responsible. An overview of green practices in the event industry.
“I think that people do not necessarily see, in the virtual, the ways to be eco-responsible, says from the outset the vice-president, general manager, associate of OPC events, Maritchou Plamondon. This is not a reflex among customers today. As an event agency, we have a responsibility to raise their awareness. »
The owner of Suite22 Events, Nadine Ménard, agrees: “There is a lot of support to be done at the moment. Often people just don’t know how to go about it, but they never resist. »
In face-to-face format, we quickly think of the large quantities of CO2 generated by the travel of participants or speakers, food surpluses or the printing of documents for a conference or congress.
According to research by sustainable event agency MeetGreen’s, a one-day in-person event produces 170 kg of CO emissions2more than 5 tons of waste and uses 36,000 sheets of paper.
Environmental impact of virtual events
According to a report published in theInternational Journal of Environmental Studies19% of a virtual event’s total emissions were produced by pre-conference planning meetings.
Calculating the environmental impact of a virtual event is more complex than for a face-to-face event. There are less tangible things to consider, such as computer usage time, power usage, bandwidth, and data storage.
“Everything about my team, I can control during production. I have abolished all that is paper, and we favor digital work tools. We don’t often think about it, but emails are also polluting. Anything that is data storage requires servers and, therefore, it needs energy to function. I regularly ask to clean up emails, we don’t keep them all in the bank, they have to be deleted. I also recommend, for example, avoiding heavy emails. We don’t want an email in carbon copy to 80 people with 12 attachments, because the heavier it is, the more storage it takes up,” explains Ms.me Ménard, whose agency is one of the first to be among the suppliers recognized by the Quebec Council for Eco-responsible Events.
To limit their ecological impacts, companies can also think about holding less frequent virtual meetings and really making them profitable.
Always according toInternational Journal of Environmental Studies, 64% of emissions related to virtual events come from data transfer. “As an organizer, you might consider compressing your video and audio files, which may allow you to use less bandwidth when transferring data,” reads the OPC agency’s website.
“There are lots of little eco-gestures that we can do and which, in the end, make a small difference. Often, people are afraid that an eco-responsible event will be expensive. Me, I want to encourage them to make these eco-gestures, which cost almost nothing, ”adds Mme Ménard, who has tripled the number of his mandates since the start of the pandemic.
Hybrid events will remain
If there’s one other thing the two experts agree on, it’s that hybrid events will continue to exist, even when the pandemic is behind us.
In addition to bringing ecological advantages, hybrid events give notoriety to a congress or a webinar, because they can have access to specialists from all over the world, while saving on the cost environment of air travel.
“I would like people, when they choose the event agency with which they are going to work, to find out about the values of the company, about what we are doing concretely for the environment”, concludes Nadine Ménard.