Had the privilege of being a part of a Green Meetings Industry Council sponsored tour of Oracle Corporations Open World at the Moscone center today in San Francisco. The day was rainy and cold for the conference but behind the scenes this Oracle team is doing some great things for our environment.
Paul Salinger Vice President, Marketing at Oracle lead the tour. Paul is also a Board Member at Green Meetings Industry Council and a VP/Board Member at Green Meetings Industry Council – Northern California. Paul has really put some action into greening the Oracle conference that descends on San Francisco every year. We were joined by many of the Moscone center (green meetings page) green team and vendors who have partnered to make Oracle a standard for greening large events.(or any event for that matter) Working with Jodi Morrison who is the Senior Director, Event Marketing Technology & Operations along with the internal green team Oracle has assembled to green the event as a whole. Paul pointed out teaming with the Portland company Meet Green has made all the difference. The MeetGreen team was with us for the tour. I personally have worked on this event in past years and I had no idea the amount of waste that an event of this size accumulates.
The one thing I enjoyed hearing was the way Paul and his team makes it work. I tried like mad to take notes on my iphone but if you want the skinny from last year and what Oracle is trying to do, check out this link to Oracles green event page. They have a case study there and they are working on this years which will be posted after all the stats come in.
The main thing Oracle is doing is tracking all the elements of the event from the miles the lettuce had to be driven, to the event tenting materials. They want to find where they can reduce the carbon footprint of the event as a whole every year.
Here are some highlights I did catch:
Tour of the kitchen where Moscone West Executive Chef Jeff Hall talked about the acquisition and preparation of food and packaging.
Using compostable packaging- no plastic. Getting the public involved to to recycle is the biggest challenge. Green Angels are stationed to help the attendees place garbage in the correct receptacles. [I missed the description of how they do this] The Chef uses local grown foods as best as possible. As Chef said. “We don’t grow bananas around here so we have to bring them in sometimes. “ Moscone also tries to prepare menus with the seasons in mind. Vendors who deliver foods must come back and get the boxes for reuse or to be recylced. Garbage is sorted by recycling coordinators. Compost is also utilized and left over food is donated to local churches.
All partner communications in the exhibit hall is paperless. The signage and carpets are made of recycled materials and can be used again. Of the outside vinyl type signage out of 150 96 of them will be reused the rest go back to the company to make roofing materials. The conference guide was reduced from 400 pages to around 160. They also shifted to nontoxic ink and used recycled paper. Which is a much more expensive way to print these but with the reduction of pages it costs the same amount. {very cool} Moscone uses all non toxic green type cleaning fluids and soaps. Even the Moscone shoe shine guy said he is experimenting with green shoe shine tools.
Oracle has a green marketplace for local green vendors plus a “Ready Set Connect” area where attendees can petal bikes to charge cell phones and computers. At last years event the attendees pedaled enough to supply enough electricity to power part of the opening session.
The one thing that really blew my mind was the elimination of plastic water bottles. They saved a whopping 1.5 million dollars!!!! Amazing!!
Above is C.Jay Dow of The Performance Group in Emeryville. I had the good fortune to hang out with him and Monique before and during the event. It was an eye opening experience for all of us. Thanks GMIC and Oracle for such a great day.
<just a little more- A case study of Oracle’s green efforts at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 demonstrated Oracles progress toward shrinking its event footprint: 61 percent of all waste was diverted from landfill, water stations replaced the need for 500,000 plastic bottles, producing a smaller print conference guide saved 965 trees, 65 percent of food served outside Moscone was local food and 20 percent was organic, and shuttles and other transportation focused on using greener vehicles.>