We had a fantastic time at the Green Expo the other week which was it’s second year.
Looking back at what we achieved we are very proud of ourselves, not just because the event was a great success but also because we have managed to reduce the events carbon footprint year on year.
How did we do it?
Energy
The biggest area has to be how the event was powered. This year that was 100% by solar energy, powering all of the stalls, the energy was enough to supply everything we needed throughout the whole 3 days, including keeping the ice cream frozen over night. All those hot coffees and more.
Single use plastic
As Plastic fee pioneers helping organisations to become plastic free we certainly couldn’t have brought single use plastic to the event.
As the event wasn’t behind closed doors and passers by were welcome to visit the stalls ,we couldn’t ban single use plastics like events such as Glasto.
But we did make sure that this was not only avoided for ourselves but reduced or avoided for others.
Three ways we did it:
- We brought our own Refill station of water which anyone was welcome to use. The Igloo containers were kindly lent to us by The Welcome Network which are used for its holiday clubs and kept the water lovely and cool over the hot days. It was well used throughout the 3 days saving an estimated 30 litres of water from being bought in single use plastic bottles, not to mention saving money for people not having to folk out for plastic bottled water locally (of course we didn’t sell any)
- Launching our reusable, returnable Cheshire cup club scheme at the event, helped to reduce the use of single use coffee cups. People could learn just how few coffee cups are actually recycled and could join for just £2.50. Giving them access to a clean returnable cup available to them whenever they wanted around Chester.
- We even went down to the detail of reusable cable ties for stalls to use throughout the event, meaning we weren’t left with lots of pointless plastic at the end and we also save time and money on not having to buy them next time.
- Most of our stalls including our food stall Fika are awarded the Plastic Free Champion business award through us signed off by Surfers Against Sewage, so we know they avoid plastic.
Food and Drink
We had the lovely 3 food vendors on site for the first time. Fika is a plant based cafe and bakery. All their products are animal free and with dairy contributing 4% of total greenhouse gases worldwide. Having a none dairy coffee is a switch that can help cut our personal carbon footprints. For every Oat milk latte you have you can feel good that it emits 70% less carbon than the dairy alternative and uses over 90% less water.
Bluestone provided a bar and along with its sister business Sandstone received its Plastic Free Champion award at our event. All single drinks are from cans or bottles. Both Bluestone and Fika sell crisps that come in home compostable packets from Three Farmers Crisps. You can even grown seeds in the packet and they will break down in the soil as the plant grows (we know we have tried it)
Recycling
From running our litter pick hubs and events project we know how important the waste and recycling is at an event. Unfortunately we couldn’t get any external support to remove recycling from the event due to cost, but we didn’t let that deter us. This year we brought our own pop up bins and bags and each of the Eco Communities team took it in turns to take back recycling to their home domestic bins. We are still working with the Council to support us more on this for futire events.
Using Gikis Litter picking calculator we have calculated that we saved well over 10kg of carbon from everything we recycled. That’s enough to watch TV for 453 hours (not that we have any time for that)
We are still not perfect but hope that we can keep improving the carbon footprint of the Green Expo and all the events we run year on year to make this event carbon positive.
If you are interested in reducing your own carbon footprint then why not join our community on Giki. Its a free tool where you can understand what your personal carbon footprint is and find easy bite sized steps to start reducing it.
Sustainable Cheshire 