ter bottles and conference bags,
to the Scroungers Center for
Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP).
Our WEC Community Project
bene;ited the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.
Thanks to the help of 350-plus
attendees, we assembled more
than 3,600 welcome kits, which
will be given to patients including infants, toddlers, young kids,
teens and new moms at the
hospital.
This is just a sampling of the
ways in which MPI made a positive impact within our host
community for WEC 2015. We
are committed to practicing solid
sustainability efforts, and under
the leadership and guidance of
Andrew Walker, MPI’s manager
of events who leads our sustainability efforts, we will continue
our journey with the implementation of ISO 20121, the event
sustainability management systems standard, as our aim is to
be third-party certi;ied in 2016.
Paul Van Deventer
MPI President & CEO
pvandeventer@mpiweb.org
IT WAS GREAT TO SEE so many
members of the MPI global community at our 2015 World Education Congress (WEC) in San Francisco last month. I do not get to
see enough of you each year, and
since creating the opportunity for
every MPI member to attend our
signature conference is not plausible, we are working on more
ways to bring the WEC experience
to those who can’t attend. WEC is
not only our opportunity to deliver premier education and content,
as well as networking and business opportunities, but it is also
our chance to showcase how MPI
puts our event sustainability
policy into practice.
Sustainability is an important
societal and business focus for our
association, and it is also a concern
for many of our members, both
professionally and personally. As
such, we strive for ways to deliver
positive value, while minimizing
negative impacts by proactively
incorporating a variety of corpo-
rate social responsibility (CSR)
practices into all of our live events,
including WEC.
This year, signi;icant focus was
placed on reducing waste while
giving back to the local community.
Actions included not providing a
printed conference guide, but instead promoting the use of the MPI
Global Event App for quick access
to schedules, speaker bios and
more. Nearly all of the signage was
printed on honeycomb graphics
eco board, a 100 percent recyclable
substrate, and digital signage was
leveraged wherever possible.
In addition, we reduced the size
of MPI OnSite, WEC’s daily newspaper, from 11” x 15” to 9” x 12,”
decreasing the amount of paper
used. The paper was sourced from
a local printer certi;ied by the
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),
Sustainable Forestry Initiative
(SFI) and Program for the Endorsement of Forestry Certi;ication
(PEFC) chain-of-custody standards.
In order to minimize food
waste, we worked with SAVOR,
the in-house catering company at
Moscone Center, to donate leftover food to San Francisco City
Impact, a local non-pro;it agency
that serves individuals in need. In
total, we donated approximately
2,735 pounds of food. But we did
not just stop there; we also donated conference materials that were
left behind, such as reusable wa-
SUSTAINABILITY
IN ACTION
FROM THE CEO MPI’s Sustainability Commitment: At MPI, we recognize that our event management activities and operations
can have both positive and negative
environmental, social and economic
impacts, and we, as an organization,
want to minimize our negative impacts
in all three of these areas to satisfy
both legal and other requirements, in
addition to our own ethical standards.
To this end, we regularly audit our
compliance with current legislation,
measure our progress and make
improvements where possible.