NEWS & UPDATES

October 14, 2008 In By Advent

A Company Taking ′Green′ Into Their Own Hands.

South by South­west (abbre­vi­ated SXSW) is a film/business/music event that hap­pens in early spring in Austin, Texas.  Austin is a very actively “green” city with a vari­ety of resources to cut down on a company’s car­bon foot­print.  How­ever, sta­tis­ti­cally fes­ti­vals and events are never as green as they seem.  Count in just the travel that occurs for a large group of peo­ple to gather in one area and one can eas­ily see the poten­tial for prob­lems.  But, SXSW is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach.  They have imple­mented these steps within their com­pany to make the SXSW event successful.

Sup­port ways to reduce car­bon diox­ide out­put.
You can buy car­bon cred­its from pro­duc­ers who use alter­na­tive energy.  You can also do some­thing so sim­ple as encour­ag­ing liv­ing things that process car­bon diox­ide into oxy­gen.  This is also known as plant­ing trees, or tak­ing care of trees.

Check your office and event build­ings.
Most energy com­pa­nies will come out and do an audit for you.  This lets you know where energy is being wasted.  Whether is an ancient fur­nace or big win­dows, this com­pany will give you the way to reduce los­ing that energy.

Encour­age green com­mut­ing.
If the event that you are plan­ning involves a lot of peo­ple com­mut­ing, then set up a shut­tle sys­tem around the city so that peo­ple can just hop onto a shut­tle.  Set up a map of where your employ­ees live and encour­age car­pool­ing to work at least once a week.  Instead of dri­ving some­where to lunch, walk to the clos­est sand­wich place.  One of the great things about SXSW is the prox­im­ity in which the event occurs.  Instead of set­ting up huge stages in Austin city parks, it is actu­ally set up in music venues all around the down­town metro area.  And because of the way Austin is set up, a lot of the music venues are right next door to one another.

Keep an eye on paper con­sump­tion.
Try to keep paper hand­outs to a min­i­mum.  One way is only print out exactly what you need.  At the Austin City Lim­its Fes­ti­val that in Sep­tem­ber, they only printed enough sched­ules for atten­dees.  When peo­ple reg­is­ter for an event, give them a paper­less option.  Would they rather have a brochure e-mailed to them as a .pdf that they can store on a mobile hand­held device or some­thing in their hand?  Have recy­cle bins specif­i­cally for paper.  SXSW recy­cles all of the waste that comes from their event, they are able to recy­cle it all because they only pro­vide items that are able to be recycled!

By mak­ing a com­mit­ment to being eco-friendly dur­ing your event, you can show how easy and prac­ti­cal it is to be a com­pany that takes care of the environment.

Authored By Advent

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