The Meeting Professional - September 2015

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.