Greener meeting venues are becoming popular in Australia and other developed countries. You will notice more and more conference venues in Melbourne implementing steps towards becoming greener. By creating sustainable decor ideas for the conference room, planners and designers can make any event glamorous. It might be a simple close-door meeting or an elaborate dinner party. Using environmentally-friendly decor options might be a cost-effective solution for conference rooms. Let’s share some helpful tips that make a great conference room set up.
Reducing Wastes with Recyclable Materials
Conference halls with robust waste-management options like recycling bins can reduce carbon footprint. One of the benefits of having a sustainable meeting place is the use of signposted bins. When there are a large number of attendees, recycling bins at strategic locations can sort and handle different types of beverage containers safely. Collection of empty plastic bottles, metallic containers, and substrate packs of drinks will reduce carbon footprints from the event. Alternatively, facility managers can offer guests some large water pitcher jugs and BPA-free reusable cups. Event planners can source recycled materials (like notebooks, pens, and mugs) for attendees. This strategy ensures zero tolerance for material that is not eco-friendly. If you want to take it a step further, opt for changing your energy supplier to those that get their energy from renewable energy sources.
Go Paperless With Digital Formats
Usually, setting up conference rooms for events include the design of marketing material, tickets, and invitation cards. With digital ticketing software, event planners can reduce carbon emission. This paperless format of sending tickets for any event is a sustainable alternative. Also, creating an app for conference room events can reduce the cost of communicating with a targeted audience. When planning your conference, the use of marketing materials in paper formats will affect our environment negatively. So, going paperless with digital marketing is sustainable, faster, and cost-effective. Alternatively, organisers can decorate their conference halls with digital billboards.
Use Non-Plastic Materials During Coffee Breaks
Every smart organiser or commercial property management teams needs flexible planning ideas; it helps to promote a sustainable conference room. By using recyclable cups, it can save seabirds, fishes, and sea turtles from swallowing plastic materials. As a way of promoting wildlife conservation and the environment, green conference rooms should use biodegradable materials. With coffee breaks, attendees might find rejuvenation during meetings too. Also, serve with platters instead of serving cookies or snacks in plastic wrappers and offer cloth napkins. While using reusable materials like bamboo and rice husk coffee cups, coffee breaks remain a green idea for every conference room.
Reduce Carbon Foot Print
There are smarter ways to incorporate ‘green’ decor ideas in conference rooms. Reducing carbon footprints is one of them when planning events. Get guests to stay in hotels that are close to conference venues. In some cases, these venues might be located in the city area which makes it convenient for the guests to travel elsewhere, as in the case of the Melbourne city conference centre. Encourage them to take a walk instead of riding in taxis, and this idea will reduce carbon footprints. Emissions of gases like carbon send heat to the atmosphere and deplete its ozone layer (blanket). So event organisers can reduce emission when guests arrive on foot to conference venues. They can save on shuttle costs and exercise too.
Serve Non-Dairy Milk During Coffee Breaks
Find the right alternatives to dairy milk before coffee breaks during your conference meeting. Oat milk is a healthy plant-sourced alternative that has less negative environmental impacts. Unlike dairy, almonds, and oat milk are great ways of conserving wildlife.
Conserving Electrical Energy
Reduce lighting power requirements in conference rooms by at least half. Unlike fluorescent tubes that consume more power, installing energy-saving LED bulbs in conference rooms is a better alternative. With tiny LED bulbs, lighting up the conference room with bright light and conserving energy is a deal-breaker for event planners. Also, energy conservation helps to reduce utility bills and the overall running cost of event planning. Smart property management teams are keying into sustainable decor ideas for conference rooms, and they include energy-saving fixtures.
Here are some examples of green conference venues that set an example for the rest:
Las Vegas is one of the cities in the world with very lofty green standards. Over the years it has attained the highest sustainability rankings, competing with other cities such as New York and Tokyo.
1. This grouping of green attributes features the awesome Aria Resort & Casino, and it is a LEED Gold licensed hotel with 4,004 guest rooms. It just wrapped a refresh of its own 300,000-square-foot convention space, including such features as new press walls, charging channels, registration places and much more. Aria actually ranks as the greatest building in the world to achieve LEED Gold certification. Listed below are a couple of its green initiatives in the office:
- The world’s first fleet of stretch limos powered by compressed natural gas (CNG). Along with abundant domestic bookings, CNG is one of the cleanest-burning alternative fuels accessible
- Working together with construction contractors to incorporate sustainable attributes including the extensive use of natural light
- Has decreased lighting power demands in guestrooms and water-saving fixtures throughout
- Achieves more than 30 per cent improvement in energy efficiency
- Saves an estimated 31 million gallons of water each year. This equates to an overall savings of 40 per cent within the construction and 60% in outdoor landscaping within existing building codes
2. Wynn Las Vegas and sister house Encore helped profit Wynn Resorts, Ltd. recognition from Newsweek among the top green Businesses in the USA in 2015. Both properties are LEED Gold certified. The linking properties combine for 4,750 guest suites and rooms along with 260,000 sq. ft. of meeting and event space. Green components which are regular comprise saving tens of thousands of pounds of paper through paperless checkout, and water decrease thanks to turfgrass and high-efficiency bathrooms. The linen reuse program is also saving resources in addition to energy intake controls in most guest rooms.
3. JW Marriott Marquis Miami has adopted a water conservation system at the laundry area which helps to conserve more than 1.5 million gallons of drinking water per year, prevents 1.5 billion gallons of chemical-laden wastewater from returning into the environment, prevents over 2,100 pounds of total organic carbon from being discharged to the wastewater treatment plant each year, and retains more than 200 tons of greenhouse gases from going into the air in the form of C02. Energy-saving thermostats in each guest room to cut down on power use exponentially in both hotels. The system senses human motion or non-movement and turns off automatically when the guest is not in the room. Green assembly features include 100 per cent Nominal recycled note pads, pens made from recycled materials, water service with no plastic water bottles, in-meeting room recycling, online occasion menus, several menu options featuring local and organic foods, organic blossoms (upon request), and paperless e-billing. The JW Marriott offers 313 guest rooms along with 80,000 sq. ft. of the meeting room.
