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September 2008
Greening CES
How the largest show in the United States gets eco-friendly
A presentation by Karen Chupka, Senior Vice President of Events & Conferences, Consumer Electronics Association
“I admit right upfront, I’m a bit of a green skeptic,” says Karen Chupka, Senior Vice President of Events & Conferences for the Consumer Electronics Association, producers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). “Yes, I do think there are things shows can do to be environmentally friendly — things that just make sense to do. But I also think there are lots of opportunities out there to be scammed.”
Speaking before a capacity crowd at EXPO/Red 7 Media’s Green Event Summit in June in San Francisco this year, Chupka walked attendees through the reasons going green became an issue for CES, and detailed the steps her team took to green the event — steps that anyone can replicate, she says. This is her presentation and a sampling of questions from EXPO Publisher/Editor and Moderator Donna Sanford and the audience.
The Consumer Electronics Association represents more than 2,200 companies across all realms of technology — from Best Buy and NBC Universal to Panasonic, Sony and Intel. CES has about 141,000 attendees who come to Las Vegas each year. About 28,000 come from outside the United States. There are more than 3,000 exhibitors, and the 2008 event reached 1.85 million net square feet of space.
Were you under pressure to green your show?
When the first people started talking about greening CES, I thought, ‘Are you nuts? We’ve got enough other things going on. The show is so large we’re stressing lots of limits. Do we really have to think about greening our show, too?’ But there are plenty of reasons we did it. Our industry is always under great scrutiny for everything from energy efficiency to the recycling of our products. No one wants to see a dump filled with old computers that could have been refurbished and given to a country in need. The analog television signals turn off next February and many are concerned about disposal of old TVs.
Our exhibitors are trying to be very proactive in setting green policies, improving energy efficiency, recycling and scrutinizing their manufacturing processes. So it’s important that as the show that represents the industry, we take that step, too. If there’s pressure on your industry to go green, you need to go green, too.
We also had internal pressure from our government affairs group. These are the people who have to lobby on Capitol Hill every day, working with Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency to tell a good story about the green efforts undertaken by our industry.
We started down this road when a team of consultants basically started telling me trade shows were evil because we have this huge carbon footprint and should be writing checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to right our wrongs. In my opinion, a trade show is just the opposite: We don’t increase business travel, we reduce it significantly. So we surveyed our attendees and exhibitors and determined there are 1.7 million meetings conducted at CES — an average of 11 to 12 meetings per attendee. It would take 700 million miles of air travel to accomplish the same number of meetings completed in four days at CES. That’s a lot of jet fuel.
There are so many moving pieces to green an event. Where do you start?
Our first step was to determine our green goal — was it going to be about reducing energy consumption, recycling or something else? We focused primarily on recycling. We sat down with each vendor and explained what we wanted to do. Most were very willing to work with us — or they actually already had systems in place that we just didn’t know about.
For example, when we went to our official services contractor, GES, we discovered 95 percent of their equipment was already running on natural gas. Trash cans were made from 100 percent recycled material and liners were biodegradable. The Visqueen is 100 percent recycleable and had 50 percent recycled content, and the vinyl tabletops were made from 100 percent recyclable materials. From a lighting perspective, the facility uses ENERGYSTAR-rated systems.
We worked with the Las Vegas Convention Center and GES to set up recycling programs. We were able to get nearly 75 percent of the materials used on the show site to be recyclable, biodegradable products — from concession items to restroom supplies. We focused on the cleaning solvents at the show, making sure they were environmentally friendly. These were all easy switches to make.
We also tested recycled carpet in one hall. My biggest fear was that 140,000 people would walk on it and it would start fraying and people would trip. But it worked really well and it’s something we’ll be using throughout the show next year. It was carpet made from recycled materials, but that could also be recycled again.
Then we looked at changing our own marketing tactics. We used to print and mail these huge 40-page conference brochures, but this year we went to a virtual brochure. It’s great because it’s like a living brochure — it can be updated daily with new speakers and sessions. And we saved 200,000 brochures from the waste stream, not to mention what we saved in costs on printing and postage.
We didn’t find any evidence that people missed the physical brochure. I think people are pretty used to going online and pulling down what they need. We sent a postcard to announce that conference registration was open. And we sent lots of electronic direct mail pieces to remind people to register. We’re constantly driving people to the Web site for updates.
We also felt this was the right time to put our exhibitor manual on a CD and get rid of those huge paper manuals. Typically, we were printing 3,000 to 4,000. We printed 100 books this year and I don’t even know that we distributed all of them. That was a huge savings. We had it available online and then we had discs available that we sent to people. We didn’t have any pushback from exhibitors, which surprised us a little. Next year, we plan to roll out an online ordering system only — no CDs.
Also for next year, we’re considering the elimination of paper press kits in the press room. For a show of our size, with 3,000 exhibitors, the amount of space the press kits take up is amazing, not to mention the amount that has to be recycled. Here we are a technology industry, and everyone’s still sending paper press kits. Put them on a USB or make them available online. Reporters prefer that anyway.
What do you think of carbon offset programs and did you pay for an offset?
Though it’s still controversial — and remember, I’m a green skeptic — we did pay a carbon offset to reduce the negative impact the event had on the environment. The group we worked with offered three opportunities for giving: renewable energies, reforestation projects and the construction of solar panels.
They calculated our carbon offset based on the number of attendees, distance traveled, hotel rooms used, exhibitor freight — everything, really, but attendee airfare — and calculated that we produced 20,310 tons of carbon dioxide at CES. Six-hundred-thousand hotel room nights made up 63 percent of that, show freight was about 24 percent, facilities were almost 12 percent, and shuttle busses were at about 1 percent. The cost to offset this was about $100,000. It’s a larger number for CES because of the size and scope of our event. It wouldn’t be that large for other shows.
We did vet the organization we used through their 990s (which are forms they have to file with the IRS as a nonprofit organization) and determined that 93 percent of the money they take in goes to the projects versus overhead costs.
We decided we would let attendees offset their own airfares, so we created a tool that would help them calculate their offset and make a donation. Not very many people did it — maybe a couple thousand dollars was donated. I could see this being something show management could do as an add-on to a registration fee, but we don’t have a registration fee. Offsetting individual airfares can be as low as $7 or $8 per person.
There are some standards in calculating the offsets, but this is all still so new, and there are a lot of questions about how the calculations work. But there are some averages about how much food a person consumes per day, how much energy it takes to operate a hotel room or how much fuel is burned shipping freight. But while you’re at my show, you’re not releasing any carbon in your hometown, so should I get a credit for that? And if we’re hurting the environment in Las Vegas, is that where the solar panel should be erected? If our exhibitors manufacture elsewhere — is that where we should plant a tree? And why are we paying for the hotel offset? Shouldn’t the hotel pay for that if they’re getting the revenue? These are all legitimate questions.
For us and for this show, it came down to being a good corporate citizen. We made the decision that this is a part of doing business. You have to do what’s right for your show and your industry. Don’t be pressured.
Did you promote your green activities?
Yes. One of the things we wanted was to raise awareness about what our industry is doing for the environment. So while we’re doing this as a show and saying that we’re going to be the largest trade show to be greened, we also wanted there to be attention about what our industry was doing and how the Dells and HPs and Motorolas are also doing things to better the environment.
There was plenty for the press to cover. We had a green tech zone on the show floor where we promoted products that were environmentally friendly or used alternative fuel or energy sources. We also rolled out a program called Technology in Emerging Countries, where we brought in people from all over the world to discuss how technology that we take for granted here in some instances could be used in other places. The president of Rwanda came in and talked about how they’re looking for recycled computers for their nation to help make them more tech savvy.
We do a press conference every November prior to our show, and the greening of CES was one of our big announcements. We incorporated it into every speech we gave and every interview our CEO had about the show. So it was definitely a big PR push to make sure we were creating that buzz. We even ran ad campaigns in Washington, DC, publications because that’s where the legislators and regulators are. We wanted people to see our industry was being responsible in this area.
Did you offer any donation programs?
We worked with a group to donate food at the end of the event to a local mission in the Las Vegas area, so food wasn’t just being disposed of. And we started working with a group called Gifts in Kind that comes at the end of the show and takes products our exhibitors don’t want to ship back and gets these items to those who need them through a network of about 1,000 different charities throughout the world.
I know some shows go to the extent of letting Gifts in Kind take used exhibits, too, but we work with a critical moveout period and this would pose logistical challenges for us.
How much did it cost to green CES?
None of what I’ve described here was really that expensive. A lot of it was just working with our vendors to change some of the things they, and we, were doing. The offset check was large, but there were substantial savings as well. For example, the exhibitor manuals went from a $10,000 line item to $1,000.
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