OUTSIDE THE BOX
is exactly what event professionals like to do. We must do better with less – a lot less. The problem is we do not have a sustainable event industry in our current form. With our current consumption, we Europeans are going to need about 3.6 earths, about 4.1 earths if everyone lives like Americans and 5.5 earths if we consume like the population of the UAE. And readers thinking, “It’s ok, the pandemic has reduced pollution and consumption over the past year”; yes,it has. We witnessed sudden reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and air pollutants, and some places saw the best air quality in decades. Cop a load of this though – global warming over the same period still increased. We still need to do more. Extreme sustainability means engineering new extreme event designs that build back better for our solitary single earth’s depleted resources. Greener, fairer, smarter Extreme design is about taking events as far as they will go, making them as good and sustainable as they can be today, and even greener, fairer, and smarter tomorrow. It is design for engineering peak performance. Learn from other industries and disciplines that prioritise and design for extreme speed or extreme quality, extreme durability, efficiency, or even extreme loyalty. Collaborate, take the lead, they earn the right to choose. Build back better A wish list would look something like this: Collaborate as an industry on big ticket items like power andwater. Our power intensive energy consumption is a
major contributor to our GHG emissions (circa 31 per cent). Purpose the industry to apower neutral position. Clean power, renewable exclusive is available now and that switch alone canreduce average carbon footprints of 476g CO2 to 1.6g CO2 per person. Collaborate as an industry to be water neutral. Water scarcity is a global issue; despite water recycling we use too much and waste even more. Purpose the entire venue industry to a water neutral position. Grey water systems in our venues and across our infrastructure where all water is recycled/heated/ filtered and re‐used. Water issues aside it offers energy savings of circa 8 per cent. Collaborate to explore repurposing event spaces to an event gallerymodel. Reduce, repair, reuse and only as a last resort recycle to stop events polluting. Purpose the industry to outlaw plastic or polluting waste materials and rapidly prototype
60 MAY 2021 mitmagazine.co.uk
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