Oracle Corp. four years ago "started down the road" to greening OpenWorld, its annual software conference for 35,000 to 40,000 delegates. Through steady progress, Oracle in 2009 boosted the conference's sustainability score to 70 (out of 100) from 64 in 2008 and 34 a year earlier, but work continues to make OpenWorld the "first truly paperless conference," Oracle marketing vice president Paul Salinger said at the Professional Convention Management Association conference. "The goal is to get to a zero-waste or carbon-neutral event. I'm not sure that's possible in the next couple of years just because of the scale of the conference, but we're getting closer year after year."
Salinger said "there is a lot of talk about running carbon-neutral or zero-waste events. I would challenge anyone who says they are running [such] events to prove it because I tend to doubt it. That being said, there are lots of things you can do to start on that path. You will not solve this in one year. This is a journey." No matter how long it takes, Salinger is confident that both his company and the meetings industry benefit as they push for sustainability.
Oracle said last year's fall conference eliminated plastic water jugs, diverted 140 tons of material from landfills, reduced ground shuttle use by 30 percent--thus reducing emissions by 18,000 pounds of carbon dioxide--and saved $858,638 in net costs.
[PULL_1]Oracle has produced OpenWorld for more than a decade, but began greening the San Francisco event in 2007, starting with the "low-hanging fruit," Salinger said. The company started to recycle, reduced paper and eliminated individual water bottles.
"We did a lot in that first year, for not knowing what we were doing," Salinger said of his event team. "We quickly recognized we needed to do a lot more and could do a lot more, but we didn't know enough on our own to get to the scale needed." Oracle turned to the Green Meetings Industry Council and a consultancy called MeetGreen to train staff, develop metrics, audit and report results.
With help from the partners, Oracle trained all event management staff in live and virtual meetings. It also created a formal sustainability policy and practices for events, and an OpenWorld green team vision, both in sync with the company's corporate sustainability policy. It also began to identify the measurements it would use to chart progress and freely circulates MeetGreen's audits of the event's sustainability efforts in 2008 and 2009. Officials have discussed the efforts at various industry events and in 2008 meetings show IMEX presented its Silver Green Meetings Award to Oracle OpenWorld.
Using MeetGreen's calculators, Salinger said Oracle OpenWorld evaluates its green initiatives in eight or nine areas that include audiovisual, destination selection, exhibitor services, food, hotel, marketing, the meeting venue and transportation. In 2007, the sustainability initiatives totaled just 34 out of 100. "That was disappointing. Oracle likes to be first in everything," Salinger said. In 2008, the event team set a goal of 60 and actually boosted the score to 64. For 2009, Salinger set a goal of 80 but scored 70 in the audit. "We are making progress," he said. "We'd like to get to 100, but that's probably many years down the road, if ever achievable."
Salinger became active in the Green Meetings Industry Council and in 2008 challenged his peers in the "event industry to divert, recycle or compost 1 million tons of trash in 2009." He promised to boost OpenWorld's landfill diversion to 100 tons, up from 67 tons in 2008. "The final number was 140 tons of diverted waste that did not go into a landfill in 2009, so it is possible to do," he said.
"There are the basic three 'R's that we've all heard about: reduce, reuse and recycle," Salinger said. "But to get to scale and understand what your footprint is, you have to think about a fourth R: rethink. You have to think differently."
Rethinking The Plan
Meeting planners often think about printing materials to communicate. Instead, Oracle OpenWorld event marketing, technology and operations senior director Jodi Morrison said they had to think of a better way to communicate. Instead of printing collateral--nearly a truckload in prior years--Oracle worked with partners to build a virtual collateral rack. Only Oracle collateral was electronically distributed the first year, but more recently sponsors and exhibitors were invited to upload collateral for distribution at kiosks or from a Web site. More than 136,000 downloads were tracked in 2009, according to the company. Instead of printing maps, Oracle created an online mapping application that allows delegates to navigate from one point to another or conduct searches, said Morrison.
While the conference program shrunk from 400 pages to 120 pages in 2009, it is still printed. "My big challenge to the marketing group this year," Salinger said, "is can we go paperless? There's a lot of resistance to this." Attendees want the paper program. Another issue is that sponsor ads in the program are a revenue stream.
[PULL_2]"Technology has changed enough in the last couple years that if we start to think about how to design a conference guide for mobile applications, we can" devise one that makes both ads and content readable for mobile phones, electronic book or tablet personal computer devices. "We can get to a paperless conference guide," Salinger said.
Responsible Reuse
Water delivery to attendees also was considered. Instead of 500,000 bottles of water, Oracle in 2008 switched to refill stations of five-gallon jugs of water from which attendees refilled the reusable bottle received at registration. The move saved $1.5 million, which was reinvested back into the program, Salinger said. By 2009, Oracle event partner Hartmann Studios devised a new water delivery system that filtered San Francisco tap water at refill stations for delegates.
Signage proved to be an area that required more innovative thinking. "Two years ago, I challenged our signage people to look at different kinds of materials that could be reused, recycled or thought of in a different way," Salinger said. He asked for materials that could be printed on, completely washed and reused. "They haven't found it yet, but they're looking."
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"They didn't find washable," added Morrison, "but they did find substances that could be reused as a roofing material after the conference instead of going into a landfill."
Materials that were "more responsible were a little more expensive," Salinger said. "We also wanted to print with soy or vegetable inks, and those tend to be a little more expensive. So you have to think about trade-offs: Can I save enough money by reducing the amount of signage and making sure it doesn't go into a landfill to pay for a more environmentally responsible way of doing it? If you can find those balances, then it's actually costing less to go green. We accept some of those trade-offs if it can get us to the goal of being more responsible."
By thinking differently, the event team reused 5 percent of signs from 2008 and determined that 37 percent of the signs produced for 2009 could be used for future events. "Only 18 percent of signage, 13,609 square feet," ended up in a landfill. About 20 percent of signage was recycled, and 25 percent was donated. More than 60 percent of the signage was made from recyclable or renewable materials; 39 percent was produced locally, while the rest was from Los Angeles to contain transportation resources. Rethinking signage, OpenWorld saved 965 trees.
Food & Transport Concerns
Working with caterers and other suppliers, event organizers tried to use as much locally grown food as possible. "Many are touting the merits of a 100-mile diet," the audit stated. "Given the baseline of food miles uncovered for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, a 100-mile diet may be a lofty goal for one year; however, keeping menus within 1,000 miles may be attainable." There simply aren't enough wheat fields within 100 miles of San Francisco, Salinger noted.
Transportation has consistently been identified as an area in need of improvement in the audits. For 2009, Oracle expanded the walking routes to reduce the number of shuttles it would provide to Moscone. "Now, hotels four to five blocks out from the convention center are on a bus route; the rest are walk routes," said Morrison. Organizers also created two new shuttle hubs to allow delegates to take advantage of San Francisco's bus and rail transit. The plan "resulted in 32 fewer shuttles," which represented "a 30 percent reduction from peak usage," reduced fuel usage by 800 gallons and cut carbon dioxide emissions, the audit report stated.
Leveraging Engagement
With its buying power, Oracle recognized that it could craft contracts to force suppliers to engage in sustainability and perhaps "have adversarial relationships, but that's not what we wanted to do," Salinger said. Instead, Oracle opted to gain such buy-in through a task force with its supplier partners. Oracle asked all suppliers to specify their sustainability goals and programs, and detailed the metrics that Oracle wanted to track from them all in 2009. "We wanted it to be voluntary and have them come into a room with us to figure out how we were going to take Oracle OpenWorld to the next level," Salinger said.
Some suppliers have benefited from the experience, Morrison noted, and now embrace and tout their own sustainability programs. Oracle invited seven vendors to participate on its 16-member green team that brainstormed solutions. But it asked dozens of vendors to submit monthly reports. Six of its seven meeting venues, 86 percent of the total, provided data. Reports reflected data from 63 hotels, which also represented 86 percent of the total. To encourage greater response, MeetGreen's audit recommended that the company provide all vendors and hotels with an online reporting format similar to one that Oracle staff used."There is no accepted template for collecting key indicators that measure event sustainability," the audit stated. "This makes it challenging to know what data to collect in order to benchmark. Team members have taken significant steps to move away from measuring performance only in percentages to identifying raw data indicators that can be better compared over time and different events."
Oracle also wanted to encourage attendee awareness and participation in sustainability. To create the awareness, the company created a Green Marketplace where attendees could buy organic foods, clothes and other goods. It also created a Ready, Set, Connect Pedal Charger station at which attendees could pedal a bike to generate battery power to recharge a laptop or mobile device, or earn a cup of coffee.
"Part of the challenge we have is educating the attendees about what we’re doing and why we're doing it,” Salinger said.
"We've been learning a lot about how to do this" Morrison added. "The first year we put basic info up on the Web and had a couple of signs out, but that's when we got pushback that we were just doing this to cut costs. So last year, we changed the Web site to add more information. We created composting stations in 2008" for materials that could be composted, re-cycled or landfilled. "We had 'greenangels' who explained what went into each bin and help [attendees] get stuff in the right spot. We had a marketplace where people could buy organic and local products."
Has attendee acceptance improved?
"Yes," Morrison said. “People are actually looking at what we're doing, looking for that education and not complaining about the water and food."
Attendee outreach and education "are important components of running responsible meetings management," Salinger said. "We've been doing a lot more education on our Web site and in the blog. My personal philosophy is you just do it. You do it because you know it's the right thing to do, and you drag the attendees along with you to some degree. Yes, you probably will get some backlash, and we have gotten some. But if you can do it at the right kind of scale without completely impacting their attendee experience, they'll come along with you eventually."