Sustainability, going green, carbon footprints are some general words that I’m sure you’ve probably heard a lot about recently with what – half of Australia on fire, changes to rising sea levels and stronger, more intense hurricanes each year. But what does that have to do with events?

Similarly to our own day-to-day lives, each event has a direct impact on the environment. Let’s take a soft drink aluminum can at a festival for example. That raw material first has to be extracted, then the materials are used to produce the can in a factory, next it’s shipped to the organizers on-site, sold to the attendees and finally disposed of either in trash or recycled. Each step of the process has negative impacts via pollution during extraction, use of energy and harsh chemicals leaking into our groundwater in production, the release of carbon into the atmosphere from trucks during shipment and if recycled, more energy is used to break it down. If it ends up in the trash, then it only adds to our growing landfills. And this is just one single can!