Kingston Sustainable Events Guidance

Climate change, and the wider ecological emergency, are existential issues. The climate is already changing, and that is going to impact every one of us. But how severe the consequences will be, will eventually depend on the world’s effort to reduce carbon emissions. It is therefore everyone’s responsibility to do their fair share to help reduce its catastrophic impacts. 

In declaring a Climate Emergency in 2019, Kingston Council committed to take decisive action to reduce carbon in all activity that we control. We will aim to be carbon neutral in operations by the challenging target of 2030, and to widen our actions to help move our borough to carbon neutrality by 2038. We will also tackle the wider ecological emergency, including biodiversity loss. 

We have a key role to play as an influencer within Kingston, however, we cannot do this alone. The Council is committed to reducing carbon emissions and the impacts of climate change for our residents, businesses and communities. One element of this is environmental sustainability in planning, managing and delivering events and festivals and a focus on reduction of carbon emissions.

The Climate Impacts of Events

Events generate a huge amount of carbon emissions. These emissions are largely generated from the energy required to power events, transport to and from the event, catering and processing waste from events. Adopting sustainability measures across these areas can have a significant impact in bringing down the overall carbon emissions of your event. 

This guidance document has been prepared to support organisers to make sustainable decisions when planning their event. Not all options may be possible or practical for all sizes and types of events, but we hope that this guidance will support events to be as sustainable as possible.

Make a plan

Delivering a sustainable event requires careful and considerate planning. When planning for the event itself, sustainability should be considered along each step of the planning process. Planning allows you to identify and take action towards what sustainable measures you can achieve for your event.

When planning to deliver a sustainable event, it is important to:

• Identify key people who can help deliver and take responsibility for the sustainability of your event. They can act as a key point of contact for your stakeholders to aid them with their sustainability measures and monitor the progress of this throughout the event. 
• Identify the priority areas you wish to focus on. You may not be able to achieve everything under each priority area, but brainstorming everything that’s possible is a good starting point. What you cannot achieve this year, might be a point of focus for next year’s event. Many of the priority areas are detailed in the guidance below but you might find others that are more suited to your event needs. 
• Set objectives and targets under those priority areas. This gives you, as the event organiser, a clear focus for what you want to achieve. These objectives and targets can also help with deciding what initiatives and marketing campaigns you wish to run to support the event.
• Consider how you will monitor and measure your success across your priority areas. Identifying what procedures, data and measurables you require for the event is key to being able to monitor and measure how sustainable your event is. This will help with target setting for future events and any key achievements should be communicated and celebrated post-event. 
• Communicate those objectives and targets to stakeholders. Your colleagues, partners and suppliers for the event may have feedback and ideas for how you can meet or go beyond your targets. Communicating your objectives to suppliers is also essential for selecting which suppliers best fits your objectives. You should also look at how you want to communicate these important messages to attendees. They are a crucial part of ensuring the event is sustainable and so clear communication on what you hope to achieve and how they should act to meet those targets is essential. 

Raising full awareness of your objectives also shows how you are taking a lead on environmental safeguarding. 

There are other things you may wish to consider when planning your event.

• My Climate has a carbon calculator so you can calculate just how much carbon you expect to emit for your event. You can use this to communicate and understand your expected impact, measure your sustainability performance over time and scope areas for improvement.
• You may wish to offset any carbon emissions your event has produced. Carbon offsets are a way of investing in projects that can ensure an equivalent amount of carbon emitted is either absorbed or avoided elsewhere. We would encourage all event organisers to focus on ways to reduce carbon emissions in the first instance, before investing in offsets for any emissions you could not reduce.

Energy Use

Whether indoors or outdoors, there are various things you can do to manage energy use to make your event more sustainable. 

Indoor Venues

If you are picking an indoor venue for your event, you may wish to explore what the building's environmental credentials are. Ideally, the venue you choose should be as energy efficient as possible, to minimise the amount of energy required to power, light and heat the building for your event. You could also find out whether the building is being powered by renewable sources. Ideally the building should also be fitted with energy-efficient lighting such as LED lights. When selecting equipment for your event, such as sound systems, projectors and computers, energy-efficient options which consume less energy should be chosen.

Attention should also be paid to how you manage the use of energy within the building. You can reduce or turn off the light and heat in unoccupied areas of the building. You should also make sure that the use of electricity for electronic equipment is turned off when not in use. In bathrooms and kitchens, you should also seek to promote water conservation practices. Communicating and promoting energy efficient behaviour amongst staff, participants and attendees is important to ensure these practices are carried out throughout the course of the event. 

Outdoor Venues

When it comes to energy use and even emissions for outdoor events, one of the biggest sources of emissions are from the generators used to power outdoor stalls and stages. Often the generators used are powered by diesel and a large amount of emissions are created as a result. Thankfully, alternative more sustainable generators can be sought and are becoming more widely available. If you are unable to fully fund or power your event using sustainable generators, a hybrid approach can be adopted to reduce emissions. 

• Solar powered generators with batteries for capturing and storing energy can power your event needs. Batteries can be charged before your event to ensure you have enough power, and the sun can continue to charge your batteries throughout the event.
• Biodiesel can also be used to power generators, which is less carbon intensive than regular diesel.

Ensuring energy efficient equipment is used for your event will also ensure less emissions.

Transport

Transport to and from the event is an important consideration for operating a sustainable event. However, the first port of call is asking yourself whether your event needs to take place in person. Running an event online is a great way to vastly reduce your carbon footprint. Not only will you save on transport emissions, but you will also save on energy, catering and waste emissions. If however, you think the event is best delivered in person, it is helpful to consider transport for those attending the event as well as your suppliers and participants at the event. 

Attendees

When booking a venue for your event, you should consider accessibility via public transport. Ensuring the venue or location is well connected will not only make it easier to encourage attendees to come to the event, but it will save on transport emissions. Ideally, the venue should be well connected with both buses and trains. If the venue or location of the event is in a more remote location, you may wish to set up shuttle bus services to collect attendees from nearby train stations. 

Another great way of vastly reducing transport emissions, is encouraging people to use bikes, scooters or walk to the event. For those wishing to use bicycles and scooters, you may wish to highlight nearby cycle lanes and places where people can lock their bikes or scooters. 

To support and encourage attendees to travel more sustainably, it is important to communicate and promote the options available to attendees. You could even offer incentives to attendees to use sustainable transport such as discounted tickets or entrance into prize draws. 

Whilst car travel to events is not ideal from an emissions perspective, promoting nearby car sharing schemes at least ensures more people are travelling together rather than alone or in small groups. 

Suppliers and Participants

For those being asked to participate or set up a stall at your event, you should consider the distances they are being asked to travel to participate or set up a stall. The less distance travelled the better. Choose local caterers or guest speakers for your event, rather than those that need to travel long distances. It is not just the distance travelled that may lead to high emissions for those long-distance travellers, it is also the emissions involved in staying a night or two at nearby accommodation. 

Where possible, you should also ask participants to travel to the event by sustainable modes of transport. Communicating the different possible modes of transport will encourage them to make this choice. 

Food and Drinks

If food and drinks are being served as part of your event, there are various things to consider to ensure the food and drinks you serve are sustainable. When selecting caterers for your event, it is really important to communicate your sustainable objectives and targets. Their operations may already be in-line with sustainability, or you may have to engage with them to encourage them to make sustainable improvements to their operations before choosing them to participate in your event. 

Sourcing of Ingredients and Goods

The sourcing of ingredients is an important factor in limiting carbon emissions. Caterers should look to source their ingredients and goods locally to reduce the amount of transport based emissions. Asking caterers to serve seasonal dishes will also support this aim as locally grown and sourced ingredients ensure ingredients have less distance to travel and that you are not having to import ingredients from overseas for your event. You can also ask your caterers to utilise more organic ingredients. Organic farming avoids the use of pesticides and fertilisers, which damages soil fertility, creates pollution and impacts biodiversity.

Another great way to reduce carbon emissions is to ask caterers to serve more vegan and vegetarian food. Meat and dairy products are the highest emitting sources of food, emitting anywhere between 10-50 times more emissions than plant based products. Vegan and vegetarian options not only benefit the environment, but are also healthier. Communicating the health benefits can be a great way of encouraging attendees to opt for vegan and vegetarian options. 

Food Waste

A large amount of emissions also comes from food waste. If you have caterers, paid to supply food for an event, you should seek to avoid buffets. Some buffet options will inevitably be more popular than others and so there will be large quantities of some dishes leftover. Providing a menu and asking guests to select their food beforehand can help avoid this issue and monitoring numbers able to attend the event will ensure less surplus food is created. If you do opt for a buffet, you should allow guests and staff to take home leftovers so that the food is not wasted. 

A plan to deal with surplus food should be considered. You may be able to donate surplus food to local food banks or community groups who can redistribute this food. If food stalls have surplus food, you should encourage them to sell food at discounted prices for the last hour of the event, to encourage people to purchase the food. There are also apps which can redistribute surplus food. 

Drinks

When serving drinks, it is good to consider how you can minimise packaging. Reducing packaging means you avoid the emissions required to make packaging, as well as the emissions involved in disposing of the waste. Making sure tap water is available free of charge can drastically reduce the amount of packaging waste, as people are not compelled to buy drinks elsewhere. To support this, you should ensure attendees either have reusable cups or are requested to bring reusable cups to the event. 

If bars are operating for your event, you should encourage bars to serve as many drinks on tap as possible, rather than individually bottled or in cans. This will drastically reduce the amount of packaging waste created at your event.

Waste

An event can produce vast amounts of waste. Typically an event might produce paper tickets, guides, leaflets, posters, banners, promotional materials, food, drink bottles and cans, giveaways and so on. Not only is that a lot of waste to collect and process at the end, but the production of these materials requires a lot of raw materials and transportation. 

The diagram below shows the waste hierarchy. From top to bottom is (prevention, re-use, recycling, recovery, and disposal) The most sustainable ways to manage waste are at the top (prevention), and the least sustainable at the bottom (disposal). Where possible, all activities to manage waste should be weighted at the top of the waste hierarchy, rather than the bottom. 

Waste Hierarchy for Events

Prevention

The best form of reducing waste and carbon emissions is preventing it from happening in the first place. Consider all the goods and services your event is providing, and all the raw materials that are required to make that happen. Ask yourself, do you really need all these things? Thinking about ways you can prevent waste from occuring in the first place is also a great tool for saving money!

Here’s a few tips for preventing waste:

• Make use of digital resources for things like tickets, guides and wristbands to avoid paper usage and printing costs. Use QR codes to direct people to information.
• Try to limit the amount of freebies to event goers, particularly those items which may be used once or thrown away.
• Adopt a plastic free policy for your event

Re-Use

Adopting reusables at your event is another great way to reduce waste. Most waste at events arises from food and drink, and most of that waste tends to be plastic. The main culprits are drink bottles and cups, straws, cutlery and plates. Reusables can easily be adopted to prevent this plastic waste and it will save you money as there will be less waste to collect. 

Here’s some information on reusables at events:

• Reusable cup schemes are popular at events across the country and have been proven to work. The Refill site has a helpful guidance document on implementing reusable cup schemes. You may even wish to let attendees bring their own reusable cups into the event. 
• If your event is in a closed or controlled space we would also recommend reusable deposit schemes for plates, bowls and cutlery. 
• Donate any leftover food to the local community so it is not wasted.

Recycling

If adopting reusables is difficult, we would strongly encourage adequate and accessible recycling facilities to be provided. Consider what waste might be at your event and speak to vendors to control the types of waste being produced so that they can easily be recycled. For example, avoid the use of polystyrene for drinks. 

Here’s some things to consider on recycling.

• Compostable packaging is frequently used as an alternative to single-use plastics. If providing compostable packing, it is important to find a waste collector who can actually compost this packaging. It will not be composted with your food waste!
• Recycling at events works best where bins have clear and noticeable signs. Having local volunteers operate recycling stations is also recommended to ensure items get put in the correct bin for recycling. 
• You may be able to hire a waste collector who can separate recyclable items from the general waste, though this will be more expensive than separating recyclable materials on-site.
• It is just as important to think about your environmental impact after an event too. You may wish to use community volunteers or hire stewarts to litter pick and separate items that are recyclable.

Disposal

When hiring a waste collector to collect your waste, it is important to ask what happens to your general waste. General waste sent to recovery usually means it is incinerated and converted into energy to power or heat nearby homes and buildings. As the general waste is not left to decompose and release methane into the atmosphere, it is considered far better than landfill. 

Disposal usually refers to waste being sent to landfill. We would encourage all event organisers to speak to their waste providers to ensure none of their waste gets sent to landfill. Waste sent to landfill is left to decompose, releasing climate harmful gases like methane and carbon dioxide. 

Did you know:

• When food waste ends up in a landfill, it creates methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Other Things to Consider

Procurement

Like with catering, you should review the sustainability of your supply chain when procuring goods for your event. Having a local supply chain will reduce the emissions involved in transporting those goods to the event. Ensuring your suppliers have strong sustainability credentials so you know your goods have been responsibly sourced will also help your cause. 

Biodiversity Impacts

Events taking place in open green spaces will impact local biodiversity. It is important to consider whether your event will impact any particular natural habitats and consider how you can minimise or prevent these impacts. Communicating this to your attendees will also help ensure this. For example, waste from events can end up littered away from the event itself. You may wish to consider organising local litter picks after the event, in nearby biodiverse areas. 

Toilets

If you are hosting a large outdoor event, you may wish to consider composting toilet facilities rather than portaloos. The waste generated from composting toilets is converted into natural fertiliser for the soil.