FSC® certified paper and low-impact ink used for program guides. Designed to deliver highly colorful experience with minimal ink coverage.
Sustainable Initiatives at Spredfast conference
I believe that a great event shouldn’t come at a high social and environmental cost. Spredfast is uniquely positioned to define the Smart Social Summit as a conference that leads with sustainability in mind and so I advocated for sustainability to be part of our design constraint from the outset of the project.
The goal: I set out to reduce the amount of materials we used in every area from vinyl for environmental graphics to custom-built display walls to the T-shirts we designed for staff and attendees. We challenged our vendors to do recycle as much of the material waste as possible including product demo stations, stage elements and food service items. I challenged my team to Design for disassembly in order to extend the life of items over future events. This included: attendee badges & landyards, and signage.
We reported sustainable efforts in 7 categories:
- The conference venue & hotel
- The food sourcing & service items
- Water bottles & water usage
- Transportation Services
- Attendee Swag
- Employee Uniforms
- Printed Signage & Environmental Graphic Designs
Our venue partnered with us to pre-wash Swell bottles that attendees could use during the event in lieu plastic water bottles and plastic cups. This water conservation effort nicely dovetailed with a pre-existing partnership with charity: water who funds and builds wells in developing countries.
We gave out Alternative Apparel Eco-Jersey Tees as swag, which delivered the softness the internal stakeholders demanded while meeting the social and ethical standards we hoped to achieve. We asked staff to wear their pre-owned branded Spredfast shirts; this approach prevents us from creating new single-use staff shirts, which saves 2,700 L of water and tons of emissions per every 1 T-shirt produced.
"By wearing this eco-jersey tee you join Spredfast in reducing the number of plastic bottles in landfills and oceans & ensuring fair and safe workplace conditions."
I painted biodegradable circles that complemented the vinyl applications for columns. I specified smaller cut vs. full-coverage vinyls in areas where a minimal pop of bright color was impactful.
The precedent is to tailor the landyards to each event, but this time, we specified generic Spredfast branding so that we could reuse them for future events.
This is my fifth conference to help produce with Spredfast, and I'm proud of the ways we have established a more sustainable mindset through incremental change in our process and practices.
