The United States Green Building Council’s annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo earned a special gift for its 10-year anniversary: the event surpassed its goal of a 90 percent diversion rate, instead hitting 95 percent.

The group’s success rate was partially realized through its partnership with the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and the venue’s efforts to help the expo reach its environmental goals.

“We have a very strong recycling program already in place at the convention center,” says Vivian Fleet, sustainability coordinator for the Metro Toronto Convention Centre [MTCC].  “We have programs in place for recycling paper and cardboard, drink containers and organic food materials. We try to minimize as much as possible the non-recyclable materials that are brought into the building.”

Currently, the majority of the cleaning products used within the facility are friendly toward the environment and the venue trains its employees to be environmentally conscious in their day-to-day work activities. While hosting the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the MTCC found no opportunity to recycle to be too small.

“The smallest one was probably the coffee lids,” Fleet says. “We made sure that every coffee lid that we sold in the facility was made out of a biodegradable, corn based plastic rather than the number 6 plastic that normal coffee lids are made out of. We went through things with a fine toothed comb.”

The MTCC’s newly installed in-house composter broke down about 8,021 pounds of food waste. While the group didn’t over look small opportunities, they also seized large ones—the venue was able to divert about 4,500 pounds of carpet from landfills through a new high-tech process that separates nylon fibers from carpet scraps and discarded carpet pieces, which are then melted and reformed into pellets that are reused to make new plastic materials.

“Recycling carpet has been a big issue with us,” says Fleet. “There’s a lot of leftover carpet that comes through and normally a lot of it gets left behind. Finding something to separates the carpet and materials and reuses it is great."

Specialty bins were labeled to help sort waste materials were included on the show floor in addition to using biodegradable food service materials to reduce waste.

“The recycling program at MTCC has been in place for several years so it’s quite well established,” she says. While Fleet wouldn’t release any figures on how much it costs to run such a program, she did say that “it’s actually in a lot of cases cheaper to recycle materials as landfill dumping rates are increased. It can be a lot cheaper to have your haulers and waste management companies take away cardboard, which is much more valuable and cheaper in the long run for the facility to recycle.”