Steps to sustainability
Sustainability is about planning your activity so that you can minimise the environmental impact of your activities, as well as reducing the economic and social impacts. By thinking about what materials you are using and the action of people at your activity, you can start to look at ways to reduce the waste of materials, save energy, and save money too. For example energy use, food, paper, and transport are all areas where you can plan to reduce the sustainability impacts of your event or activity.
For a quick and simple solution there is the Greening your event guide which includes a handy checklist to guide you through the basics.
Environmental Business Pledge
The Environmental Business Pledge is a unique initiative developed to help Manchester Businesses and organizations to improve their environmental performance, reduce their carbon footprint and achieve major cost savings.
Green Tourism Business Scheme
The aim of the Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS) criteria is to offer guidelines to tourism businesses on how to make their operations more sustainable while still delivering a high quality service. When developing the criteria consideration has been given to a wide range of social and environmental factors, as well as up-to-date technological developments
BS 8901
This is a management system that requires organisations to aspire to continually improve their sustainability performance in relation to the management of events. The purpose of this new standard is to help the events industry to improve performance relating to the events and conference industry. All British Standards can be accessed via the city's Library Service website.
Manchester Sustainable Event Charter
Following the publication of the city's Climate Change Action Plan Manchester - A Certain Future the Manchester Sustainable Event Charter has been developed in partnership between Manchester City Council, Green Tourism and Positive Impact to drive change towards achieving sustainable event management in the city.
The Charter commits signatories to core commitments that align with the event and conferencing actions in Manchester - A Certain Future on buildings and energy, transportation, sustainable consumption and production, and people and culture change.