Event Sustainability Starts With Simplicity

What’s the First Word?

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of sustainability? I ask this at the start of every Sustainable Event Essentials session I facilitate, and the answers never get old. At our first public session earlier this month, I heard:

• Earth
• Regenerative
• Impactful
• Green
• Responsibility

Ask again over the life of this program, and you’ll also hear:

• Complicated
• Inconvenient
• Expensive
• Overwhelming

That range feels about right. My word that day was simplicity, which tends to raise an eyebrow or two. Fair enough.

Event Sustainability

Sustainability can be inspiring but also hard to put into practice, especially in events, where decisions about venue, food, materials, travel, sourcing, logistics, and vendors are all tangled together in their impact on carbon, waste, and cost.

Sustainable Event Essentials

Sustainable Event Essentials is built around how small, deliberate, upstream decisions can create cumulative positive impacts across an event. Ninety minutes, live, no slides conversation… This first public session brought together:

• Venue event managers
• Convention center leadership
• Sustainability consultant
• Couple of us from the MeetGreen team

The conversation went places I hadn’t scripted, which is exactly how we keep discussions dynamic and learn from each other.

Event Sustainability Challenges

We ran a couple of quick exercises to get some of the bigger, abstract concepts to click. But the best part of the morning was stopping mid-slide to talk through what’s actually getting in the way for the people in the room:

• Too many vendors and stakeholders pointed at different goals
• Waste data that’s nearly impossible to attribute to one event when a venue is running three others at the same time
• The pull back toward convenience over reuse

None of that is unique to this group. Variations of these issues emerge in almost every session, which is one of the most useful parts of running this quarterly. The problems repeat, as do the opportunities to address them.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle…

Reduction is the idea we return to again and again. Reduce, reuse, recycle isn’t exactly a secret, but treated as a true upstream decision-making hierarchy instead of a recycling slogan, it holds up:

• Using less material
• Ordering more accurately
• Simplifying what gets built or shipped
• Cutting something altogether reduces cost, carbon, and waste all at once

Digging Into Diversion Rate

On the more educational side, we also covered why diversion rate, the metric many clients and venues chase hardest, doesn’t hold up as a goal on its own. The waste picture only makes sense from a few angles:

• How much waste an event produced in total?
• How much got diverted from the landfill?
• How much was generated per participant per day?

A high diversion number can look great and still sit on top of a total waste problem.

Timing is Everything

Timing matters just as much. The earlier sustainability enters the conversation, the more options are still on the table. Decisions made during sourcing, design, and contracting shape what’s possible months later, while the people onsite usually work within choices locked in long before they arrive.

• Use less
• Keep it simple
• Decide as early upstream as you can

Those three ideas are the throughline for the whole session, and everything else we cover builds on them.

Small Wins Add Up to Big Progress

No one needs to solve everything at once. A few small wins in a row become a repeatable practice, then something you can measure and improve, then eventually just how an event gets planned. That’s how small wins add up to big progress. By the end, when we returned to the reflection questions, a few people’s answers echoed the words they’d opened with, just with more shape to them. That shift, small as it looks from the outside, is real progress.

Join Us for the Next Session

If complicated was your first word, I get it. Come talk it through with the rest of the event planning community in our next public session!

Interested in joining us? Our next Sustainable Event Essentials session is coming up November 18, 2026, and it’s free to attend.