How to Build a More Sustainable Event & Community

Introduction: Expo Experts Explained Kickoff

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first ever Expo, Experts Explained Webinar. And I'm excited to introduce our first guest, Liz Bothwell. Liz, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here.

About Waste360 & Liz’s Role

Tell us a little bit about Waste three sixty, what it is, and what your involvement there is.

Absolutely. So Waste three sixty is part of Informa Markets North America, and our group is within the industry of waste, recycling, organics, and sustainability. And the beauty of this industry is that it's so close knit. And you have everyone from sort of the grassroots folks with the mom and pops with one or two trucks, all the way up to the largest publicly traded companies in the world. You have inventors. You have brilliant young professionals. I have to say this has been my biggest joy working within this group and getting to know this industry so well.

How the Event Industry Is Evolving

Based on where you sit and what you're working on, how do you see the event industry evolving right now?

Today, we're talking about sustainability. I think that's huge. And I think that goes beyond just the environmental piece. There's that big social piece as well.

And I think many of us in the industry are embracing that and bringing voices forward that need to be heard and deserve to be heard. I also think we all realize how important content is. I know when I first started, it was all about the cash cow of events and how great the margins are. That's all well and good, but this world is not based on transactions.

So to dig deeper, to build deeper, to really get into your community and understand what they need and what they're looking for, and then you become part of the community and you're not just a person selling booth space or selling a high end ticket to what you deem as a fabulous conference. They want to be there, and you've created an environment for them to get together. I think those kinds of things are amazing. Add technology to that and personalized experiences, and I think we've come a long way.

COVID was a wake up call to really embrace content and be more diversified and I just hope that stays with us as we head out and most of our events are killing it and we are getting the numbers back that we've we wanted in twenty nineteen and prior. So I just hope that we all keep an eye on content and make sure that we're bringing that to our audience so that you also, as a business, have something to talk to them about throughout the year and engage with them.

Who Owns Sustainability at Events?

When we're thinking about sustainability for our events, Who has the main role in that?

Well, think we're lucky in Informa on the sustainability front because we have a fabulous group, and the leader of that group is based in London and he came up with the sustainability fundamentals that we all follow. And that they've grown over the years and will continue to grow, but what I love about them is that it keeps us accountable and it pulls everybody in. The fact that we have these accountability fundamentals to follow and that are benchmarks, so year after year, we want to continue to develop those and improve upon those year after year. So I think on the environmental side, have that and it helps everybody from every, department and group within your bigger group think about sustainability daily and how you can incorporate it more into into your brand and into the experience.

Informa’s Sustainability Fundamentals (Global Scope)

So you have actually a set of directives that you're following. Is this for every, like, every in person event you do or is this for everything globally across the organization?

It's globally across the organization. I believe it started with a few hundred, and now I believe it's in the thousands of, who's actually using these fundamentals. So it's great. So it breaks everything down from from carbon and waste all the way to partnerships and, building communities. What is great about it for our brand is that we were doing a lot of this already.

Yep.

So it gave us sort of that checklist to to be like, okay. Is there more we can do? What else can we offer our audience? What else can we do at the event prior to the event? And also a big piece of it is how do we communicate it out that we're actually doing this so that the audience feels like they're doing their part as well?

Measuring Impact: Reports, Diversion & On-Site Activations

And you said that you are sort of you have metrics around this and you're measured by this.

Can you give us example of a couple of things where, you know, our act Actual metrics around this idea of sustainability.

We have a a sustainability report that we do for waste expo. And within that report, we talk about the waste that was diverted, what type of materials were recycled, or how much food waste was diverted and or handled. There are so many different measurements along those lines that we do. That's just the Waste three sixty side.

But on the Informa side, I mean, it's everything from lighting to carpeting and donation programs and really everything in between engaging with partners. So for example, on the Waste three sixty side, we have what we call our zero waste lunch. So the zero waste lunch is we put together a lunch within a dumpster that's donated, usually from one of our exhibitors. It's a clean dumpster, I promise you that.

And then the chef creates this Amazing gourmet meal out of food that would have otherwise gone wasted. We invite some top names from the food waste recovery forum so that they can enjoy this lunch together and they see that it was created out of food that would otherwise gone wasted. And another thing that we do is we do these blender bikes at sustainability talks and we use ugly fruit that would have otherwise gone wasted as well. So we're trying to create fun experiences around sustainability so it educates and people actually enjoy it.

And we're putting good use to food and other things that would have otherwise gone wasted.

What Waste360 Is (Umbrella Brand & WasteExpo)

But what is it? What is Waste three sixty from a big picture standpoint?

So Waste three sixty is our umbrella brand, and we have our event Waste Expo. So we really provide news, information, and resources to the waste and recycling and sustainability industry. And it takes the form of digital. We do webinars as well, online events, online education. We have newsletters, websites. So we really are engaged with our audience daily year round. And then Waste Expo is part of that, but we've worked over the years to really integrate the two so that people understand the value of Waste three sixty, being the owner of Waste Expo.

Essentially, you've built a community around waste and around garbage and recycling. Right?

Exactly.

Community Size & Year-Round Media

How big, you know, would you estimate this community is?

A lot of our readers come from North America just because the nature of the market. Waste is very regional. So we do cover, and look for inspiration elsewhere, but a lot of it is in North America. But I would say our universe is is probably about seventy five thousand, eighty thousand. Waste expo gets we cover earnings for this week for the public company, so we're covering everything from that real news all the way to I host a podcast called Nothing Wasted, where really that gave us a sustainability outlet to talk to people in CPG brands and what we call waste generators that go beyond just sort of our base of haulers and recyclers and people who are really trying to find solutions to bigger sustainability issues like plastics and food waste and textile waste and all of those other things that are really on all of our minds now.

High-Impact, Low-Cost Ideas for Lean Teams

As a lean startup with a small team juggling many roles, what, Liz, would you think would be the best one or two initiatives to undertake for kind of the most impact at the least cost?

Start small because there's there's always a way, and you have to go for progress, not perfection. See what your venues are doing already and be part of that and see if you can do more with that. I know that we're talking about costs here, but there's also cost savings involved. Maybe consider a virtual option for people, and then that cuts down on carbon.

It cuts down on expenses of travel. Also, know for Informa across the board, we cut carpet in the aisle. Not only was that a great sustainability measure, but it also was a huge cost savings. It's the same as if the way that we are consumers at home.

The first thing you can do is is look at your current behavior. Is there something that you can you can decide not to buy or not to consume? Think about that as the way you approach your business too.

Sustainable Booth & Experience Ideas

You wanna have something that brings people to your booth, You wanna have people want a reason to talk to you. But how do you do that in a sustainable format?

So one thing we're doing at Waste Expo this year that we're really looking forward to is we are having something called SketchBox, and it's super cool. Will draw your picture with a little robot. So it's it's super cool, and it is sustainable because you can get it in digital form. And we are also offering it on recycled paper that will then again be recycled.

And we have a branded booth at Waste Expo, our Waste three sixty booth, and we're doing some retro video games there so people can come and have some fun. A lot of these experiences can go digital. You know, even your photo booth can be a digital email that somebody gets or a text that shows the picture of them having a good time with their crew. So there are just so many ways that you can think about just having less of an impact on your event and your environment.

Beyond Environmental: Social & Societal Impact

We talk about the environmental impact a lot, but there's also the social and the societal impact. So maybe take us through how you think about that.

I mentioned our forty under forty program. Now that's an awards program for young professionals. I bet a lot of you have that. We get hundreds and hundreds of nominations, and they range from haulers to recyclers to battery inventors.

These these folks range, and they have a lot to offer. So we wanted to elevate their voices and put a spotlight on them as sustainability professionals. It's about empowering women. It's about recycling in your community.

It's about building a community around garbage pickup programs, and we wanted to bring that to the forefront. And one of those winners, his name is Terrell, and during the pandemic, he started as a sanitation worker. He realized that people don't see how hard this job is. So he was spotlighting that behind the scenes on his Instagram feed.

And we were so enamored by him and so many people were that his following started to grow, grow, grow. He won our forty under forty because he was a changemaker in Philadelphia. He wrote a book called Recycling is Cool. And now that book is out, he goes to his daughter's school and reads about it now.

And we've supported him on that mission. We've we've helped him with the book. We've followed him during all of his cleanups and his pickups, and he's created his own following. And like I said, he's really creating his own legacy and advocacy program in Philadelphia.

And he is just one of many who we're helping bring to the forefront and showcase because they're doing the important work in the industry. We've employed some, Waste Expo insiders and a few of those voices are there. So what we're doing there is having them show their perspective of the event while they're there.

Year-Round Content Strategy & Amplification

Let's talk a little bit about about content and how you're using content to kinda keep your audience engaged year round.

You know, no matter how good your content is, if you're not amplifying it, what's the point? And that goes for live events as well. It's a vault of content that we can reuse throughout the year. Since I mentioned the forty under forty awards program, I'll go back to that to give you one concrete example of how we do content around that all year.

So what happens is we open the forty under forty for nominations. We choose the nominations, and then we announce them, invite them to the show. We We give them a wonderful reception. They come up to the stage, they get their award.

We do interviews on-site. We have a session with some of them in there. The following year, we do the same. But throughout the year, what we do is we cover them.

What I mean by that is you, Matt, if you win, I'm coming to you, and I wanna learn all about you. Why you won this award, what your background is, what your priorities are, what you see for the future of the industry. We're gonna cover that, whether it's a written article or a podcast with me. And then the beauty of it is that these folks also become tight knit part of our community and then some of them write for us.

We have a LinkedIn group. We really engage with them throughout the year. And then, again, the beauty of it is they're always with us. So we follow their promotions.

We follow what they're doing. We invite them to speak at other events. We recommend them to other events. We're talking internally with another group, and I can think off the top of my head how to help them get five or ten speakers just from our world of forty under forty winners for what they're trying to do in another market.

Again, you can start small. You don't have to launch an award program in order to do this. You can spotlight a speaker every Tuesday. Whatever works for you and however you can that with With The the group that you have and the staff that you have, start small.

But just to elevate them is just That third party objective expertise goes a long way within the industry.

Getting More Aware & Telling Your Sustainability Story

How can we be more aware of event sustainability efforts within the events that we are running?

You know, we're more inclined to think about how this impacts a community or an organization and what either your your donations did for them rather than the stats all the time.

But I think a good way would be just to make sure you're all on the same page, whether it's during your team calls or reach out. I mean, you be your own little sustainability advocate and just say, hey, I wanna tell our sustainability story. Can you show me how? Ask your ops person. And if he or she doesn't know, ask for permission to contact the convention center or the hotel or your your food person and find out what they're doing and then, be able to tell that story. It will be the the fascinating impact of of you inquiring. And keep up the curiosity because that's that's how you will tell a great story.

Podcast Plug: “Nothing Wasted”

You mentioned a podcast that you do, and I would love to just give the shout out to that because folks who are more interested in in continuing sort of the sustainability discussion. What is that podcast called?

Sure. It's called Waste three sixty's Nothing Wasted podcast.

Closing

We thank you so much for being here at our first Expo Experts Explained. Thanks, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.

‍