Creating our greenest conference yet
Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2025
Earlier this year, our team was very excited to learn that the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) had chosen the University of Birmingham to host its prestigious annual conference which is being held outside of their headquarters in London for the first time in three years. The organisers had a very clear brief: to run the event as sustainably as possible for up to 2,000 delegates a day over three days. Event Project Manager Annaliese – who leads on Sustainable Events – shared her approach to this sustainable challenge.
Events Project Manager – Annaliese Stanton
With such large numbers attending it’s important that whatever we do in terms of sustainability, it’s got to be practical. With 6,000 meals and 12,000 hot drinks over three days, the event needs to work efficiently as well as sustainably. I’ve started by focusing on the areas that I feel our team can have the most influence over which, at the moment, includes food, waste and delegate travel.
With the conference spread across several buildings on campus, we will be using a central marquee to serve all our catering to delegates (up to 2,000 lunches and 4,000 hot drinks per day). Logistically transporting and washing crockery at this volume and in this location is going to be difficult. The easiest, most practical solution would be to use disposable plates and cups, but of course that would create lots of waste. I’ve done some research and have discovered an edible cup from a company called Stroodles and seaweed-coated lunch containers from Notpla, both of which are made from environmentally friendly materials and are fully compostable. The cup is even edible! This is great news, as this will avoid any waste going into landfill and will really minimise the carbon impact of our event. However, it’s been surprisingly challenging to find a local supplier who will accept compostable waste. After much searching, I’m pleased to say that we have finally found a provider – but now we need to work out where to store the waste until it’s collected right at the end of the event.
In terms of food, our wonderful catering team already offers a carefully designed, delicious carbon A-rated menu for conferences and events. For RGS we are creating a bespoke menu with four different low-carbon vegan salads, which include gluten and nut-free options. We are also looking at individually packaged biscuits for breaktimes which are both sustainable and wrapped in recyclable packaging. However, I’m still double checking that we are able to recycle the wrappers as advertised, so more investigation is still needed.
It is well known that delegate travel is the biggest contributor when measuring the carbon impact of events. It’s often one of the hardest things to influence as the event organiser. RGS is passionate about encouraging their delegates to travel sustainably as possible and we wanted explore ways in which we could support this. Working with our Sustainable Travel Officer, we’ve managed to secure free bus travel for our conference delegates through our partners at Transport for West Midlands. We were delighted to be able to share that news with the conference organisers.
That’s it for now, I’ll keep you posted on the progress of our sustainable journey. Next, we’ll be looking at sustainable signage and delegate welfare.
