Our eco-friendly options are perfect for environmentally conscious events, and they can help to reduce the carbon footprint of your event.
What is the Environmental Impact of an Event?
Events can consume a lot of energy and produce a serious amount of waste. The typical conference attendee produces 1.89kg of waste per day, of that over 60% is landfill.
A broad awareness of climate change’s negative effects, poor waste management and unsustainable energy consumption extends to attendees who expect events organisers to maximise sustainable materials and minimise waste. In 2020, a survey found that 60% of event attendees expressed a preference for events that used sustainable practices, with, “over 25% strongly preferring such conferences.”
Traditional plastic name badges contribute to the growing problem of plastic waste in our world. By opting for eco-friendly materials, you are helping to lessen this impact and promote a more sustainable environment.
What Does a Sustainable Event Look Like
Sustainable practices can be wide-ranging, from reducing air travel by offering a hybrid event experience, to providing biodegradable paper coffee cups.
You may have heard the term ‘event greening’ before, which is the process of organising events that consider and take care of the environment. Planners apply green principles across every aspect of the event, from site selection to information delivery.
Essentially what it means is creating an event with a minimal ecological footprint by using sustainable practices.
While it can be overwhelming to look at all parts of your business and improve each area by 100% today, if you start small, and work on one area at a time, you can make incremental changes to reduce your impact on the planet.
But where should you begin? One easy way to start is by choosing eco-friendly event badges. These are made from sustainable materials that help to reduce waste and promote sustainability at your event.
What We’re Doing at CrowdComms
CrowdComms takes its environmental responsibilities seriously. Part of our service development responsibility is to provide sustainable solutions that help event planners produce eco-friendly events with a minimal environmental impact.
Over the last thirteen years, we’ve helped thousands of events reduce paper usage through our industry-leading event app and recyclable event badges.
The CrowdComms App, for example, acts like a virtual brochure that contains dynamic and interactive features, including agendas, maps, and even multi-page abstracts. No paper needed!
Over the last few years however, we have turned our attention to making our name badge processing as sustainable as possible.
Sustainable Event Name Badges
CrowdComms’ eco-friendly badges deliver the design style and durability of traditional name badges while keeping a focus on event sustainability.
When researching the material to use we looked for options that would meet our eco-objectives, without compromising durability or image quality and these badges are the result.
The main badge type we use for “eco badges” is the ExpoBadge T180
Due to the lack of backing paper, no residual waste is created, which results in a cleaner environment where printing takes place. The ExpoBadge T180, printed on strong matte paper, is also only made of paper and so these badges are suitable for recycling after use as wastepaper.
No More Event Badge Wallets
With the quality of sustainable materials available today, there is no need for the single use plastic pouches you’re used to seeing at events. So, we’ve replaced them and updated it with more eco-friendly reinforced recyclable paper.
Tough and durable, the paper badges are strong enough to last for multi-day events and don’t compromise on print quality through our contactless event badge kiosks.
Easy to print via our lightning-fast badge printing kiosks, the badges simply clip onto your event lanyard.
Tip: at the end of your event, have recycle dump bins available at exit points so attendees
can easily hand over their badges for recycling.
Lanyards
Traditionally, lanyards were made from single-use plastics on non-biodegradable materials such as nylon.
Developments in lanyard production technology have produced big improvements in sustainability. Sustainable lanyards look just as good as their plastic counterparts but are much kinder to the environment.
Two material options to look for when choosing your lanyards are recycled PET or bamboo fibre:
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- Recycled PET has an endless life cycle! Derived from plastic PET bottles, the fibres are extracted and spun into a durable yarn. The ability to keep recycling PET over and over is an effective way of avoiding the crude oil and natural gas extraction required for new plastics.
- Bamboo Fibre is natural, biodegradable and sourced from fast-growing, sustainable crops. It produces a hard-wearing but soft yarn that feels and looks great.
Both options deliver superior print quality to ensure your event or sponsor brand has high visibility and impact and because these lanyards offer great durability, if you want to re-use them for next year’s event, you can.
Ticketless Badge-Printing
So now you have a great-looking badge and lanyard combination, let’s take a look at the printing process. CrowdComms have made badge printing more environmentally friendly!
CrowdComms’ smart badge-printing kiosks use touch-screen or QR code technology. No need for pre-printed tickets, scanned details can be downloaded straight to attendees’ mobile devices.
The kiosks also print-on-demand, which means less paper waste as only the badges that are needed get printed and those badges printed, you guessed it, are recyclable!
Want an eco-friendlier badge, printing and lanyard option at your next event? Get in touch
