Conventions take a turn toward the green

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Imagine a stack of a hundred plastic name badges, resting on top of 600 disposable water bottles, 1,200 Styrofoam cups and plastic utensils, thousands of pages of printed brochures and an untold number of promotional geegaws such as plastic pens, mouse pads and magnets.Then multiply that by a million. And drive it all to landfills throughout the country.That illustrates just part of the environmental impact of America's convention and meeting industry -- a $107 billion industry that serves 136.5 million people attending 1.2 million business events each year.Because the industry is so varied -- with events ranging from 50,000-person technology conventions to 20-person company retreats -- no one has reliable data on the toll taken on the environment by all these gatherings. And for decades, convention planners and participants have worried more about things like convenience and cost than about how their meetings are affecting the planet. But over the past year, a small but growing number of meeting planners are taking steps to reduce waste and environmental damage."There was a time about three years ago when my partner and I felt like we were beating our heads against the wall," said Nancy Wilson, a Portland, Ore., meeting planner whose firm specializes in environmentally friendly events and who co-founded the Green Meeting Industry Council in 2003. "Then, around the time Al Gore's movie came out, it just went crazy.""It is the topic du jour for every conference this year in the meeting and incentive travel industry," said Bruce Tepper, author of "The Complete Guide to Selling Meetings, Incentives and Corporate Events." The country's 1.2 million business meetings, trade shows and conventions affect the environment in a variety of ways -- through the greenhouse gases emitted during travel, the electricity and water consumed during events and hotel stays, the exhibit booths built from scratch and then dismantled, and the countless small items that are generated, doled out and discarded. Wilson said that 2,500 people attending a five-day conference -- with three meals and two coffee breaks each day -- can end up using as many as 62,500 plates, 87,500 napkins, 75,000 cups or glasses, and 90,000 cans or bottles.And a 2000 study by the Environmental Protection Agency said that the typical convention-goer who is staying at a hotel generates about 20 pounds of trash per day, compared with 4.6 pounds at home. "Every time you have an event, you create a miniature city and then tear it down," said Georgia Maliki, president of Seven-Star, a North Carolina firm that produces environmentally friendly events. Over the past decade, a few firms like Seven-Star and Wilson's company, Meeting Strategies Worldwide, have carved out a niche as producers of green events.Last fall's Green Festival in San Francisco -- a 40,000-person consumer exhibition produced by Seven-Star -- was an example. Instead of water bottles, attendees bought compostable cups made out of corn starch and refilled them at free water stations. Food vendors hawked lunches made from 80 percent organic ingredients. The program guide was printed locally on recycled paper. Exhibitors -- who faced fines if they left trash behind after the show -- decorated their booths with cloth or compostable table coverings rather than disposable vinyl. And instead of trash cans, visitors encountered a lineup of green compost bins, blue recycling bins, black landfill bins, buckets for liquid and piles for cardboard. Outside the show, scores of volunteers in organic cotton T-shirts sorted through the bins for misplaced items that could contaminate the recycling or compost shipments. Seven-Star's efforts managed to keep 98 percent of the festival's trash -- 47,745 out of 48,745 pounds -- out of the landfill."There's no reason that any special event can't have at least 85 percent diversion, so that only 15 percent is destined for the landfill," Maliki said. With its focus on eco-friendly consumers, the Green Festival is clearly atypical.But -- in a sign of how green meetings are starting to go mainstream -- some environmental measures were also in evidence in November at Oracle OpenWorld, a 42,000-person technology convention in San Francisco.Oracle gave refillable water bottles to every registrant in an effort to cut the use of disposable bottled water. The company printed its pavilion signs on cardboard rather than vinyl, used recycled paper for its program guide and handouts, and set up bins to collect plastic name badges as people left the convention. But environmental steps often require extra spending -- which meeting planners and their clients have traditionally been reluctant to do. For instance, few companies think about environmental concerns when buying promotional trinkets such as plastic pens and magnets, although about $2 billion worth of such items are handed out at trade shows each year. "In the past, people made half-hearted efforts -- you could get recycled plastic in any color as long as it was black -- and it was more expensive," said Paul Kiewiet, former chairman of the Promotional Products Association International. "People saw (environmental concerns) as an extra cost rather than making a difference," said Bruce MacMillan, president of Meeting Professionals International. That may be starting to change.Nearly every professional association in the meeting industry has created green task forces or reports within the past two years. The number of companies selling environmentally friendly products for trade show booths rose from just one last year to 30 this year at Exhibitor2008, a national gathering for the exhibit industry. But Tepper, the travel industry consultant, believes that much of the industry buzz about green meetings is simply smoke and hype. "What's driving it is the view that every other association is doing this," Tepper said. "There'll be a new cause down the line. ... Clients just don't care. It comes back to money."(E-mail Ilana DeBare at idebare(at)sfchronicle.com) (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)