Sustainable events: the choices that truly count

To make sustainable choices, you need to know where the impact is greatest. At corporate events there are a few dominant sources of environmental impact:

Transport is responsible for 60 to 80 per cent of an event's total CO₂ emissions. That's mainly down to how participants travel: the car is by far the biggest culprit. Actively encourage public transport through your communication and cover the public transport costs. Choose venues that are easy to reach by train.

Catering accounts for 10 to 20 per cent of the impact. Meat, beef especially, has the highest CO₂ footprint. A menu without meat, or with plant-based alternatives as the standard option, lowers the impact considerably. Work with seasonal ingredients, local suppliers and a caterer who actively manages food waste.

Energy and technology is the third big item. Lighting, sound and climate control use a lot of power. Ask venues and technical suppliers about their energy source. Choose LED lighting and avoid unnecessary tech.

Catering is the most visible sustainability choice at an event. It's also the point where clients get the most questions from participants. What works?

A plant-based menu as standard. Make the plant-based menu the default and offer meat as an option rather than the other way round. Research consistently shows that participants accept this when the quality is good. Choose a caterer who doesn't treat plant-based as an afterthought.

Seasonal and local. Ask the caterer about where products come from. A menu built on what's growing in the Netherlands right now has a fraction of the transport footprint of imported ingredients.

No single-use plastic. Reusable crockery and cutlery is always achievable at indoor events. At outdoor events it's logistically more complex, but compostable alternatives are available. Avoid polystyrene and single-use plastic.

Tackle food waste. Ask the caterer about their approach: how much food did they waste at previous events, and what happens to leftovers? Professional caterers work with fixed calculation models and donate leftover food to food banks.

The choice of venue has a direct influence on two big environmental items: transport (reachability by public transport) and energy (insulation, energy source, lighting).

Public transport access is the most important factor. A venue within walking distance of a station has a much lower transport footprint. A comparable venue reachable only by car does not. For large groups this weighs more heavily than any other sustainability feature of the venue itself.

Ask venues about their sustainability policy. More and more event venues report on energy use and run on green electricity. Some have solar panels or an ISO 14001 certification. This is measurable and comparable.

Your own premises as a sustainable choice. An event at your own workplace saves on WKR (work-related costs scheme) charges and on transport. Employees travel to the office anyway. That saves CO₂ compared with an external venue everyone has to travel to specially.

Actively steer transport. Organise carpooling options and communicate actively about public transport options. Reimburse or subsidise the train ticket. Small measures that have the most impact on the biggest environmental cost item.

More and more organisations want to make sustainable choices and be able to account for those choices. That calls for measurement.

A CO₂ calculation for an event covers several items. These include participant transport (based on mode and distance) and energy use at the venue. But also catering (based on menu composition), material use and waste transport. Certified calculation methods exist, such as the ISO 20121 standard for sustainable event management.

Do you want to report annually as an organisation on the CO₂ footprint of your events? That's possible. Live Impact works with tools that record the inputs per event and generate an overview per year. Handy for ESG reporting and communicating progress internally.

Note: offsetting via carbon credits is no substitute for reduction. Only offset what you can't reduce, and communicate transparently about the difference. Greenwashing (claiming sustainability without evidence) is reputational damage in the making.

Live Impact is IDEA-certified. That certificate, issued by the International IDEA Foundation, requires demonstrable standards in safety, organisational quality and sustainability. It's not self-claimed, it's audited.

In practice this means the following. We actively select suppliers on their sustainability policy and advise clients on the choices with the highest impact. And we report transparently on what we measure.

Want to organise an event that takes sustainability seriously? Then we start with a conversation about your ambitions, and build the concept from there. Not the other way round.

Call us on 085 401 40 14, send an email to hello@live-impact.nl or a brief via live-impact.nl/briefing. Seriously fun.