Plain definitions, the four places where events have real impact, and what doesn't count. Start here.
I have asked a lot of people in this business what a sustainable event is. Planners, hotel sales directors, caterers, our own designers. The answers are all over the place and most of them come with a little hesitation. Bamboo plates. Offsets. No balloons. One hotel manager told me it meant the sign by the trash cans. He wasn't wrong, exactly. He just wasn't close to the whole thing, and he knew it.
That hesitation is the problem I care about. Nobody sells what they can't explain. And nobody buys it from a seller who can't explain it either. So let me try to explain it the way I'd explain it across a table.
Not perfection. Not zero impact. An event is a small city you put up for one night and take down the next morning, and it will always use things up. What I'm describing is the difference between an event where nobody thought about that and one where somebody did, in ways you can point to and count.
I spent close to forty years around flower farms before I ran an event company, so I came at this from the supply side, and I tend to see it in four pieces. You can go a long way down into any of them. But if your team has these four, they have the subject.
The biggest lever we have, by a wide margin, is whether a thing gets used once or forty times. A scenic wall built for one Saturday and in the dumpster by Sunday night is a very different object from the same wall built modular, trucked back to Winter Garden, and sent out again next month. Same for furniture, linens, vessels, sign frames, lighting, all of it.
This is also where the money argument flips. Rental inventory pays for itself across many events, so it costs the client less than custom fabrication, and it is better for the planet. Those two things are usually in tension in people's minds. Here they aren't. When a planner hears "sustainable" and thinks "expensive," reuse is where I start, because it's the opposite.
What to ask: how much of this design is rented or reusable, and what happens to the custom pieces when the event ends?
This one is personal for me. I spent decades on rose farms in Ecuador and Colombia, and I love cut flowers. I also know exactly how far they travel and how fast they die. A rose cut on a Tuesday in Cayambe is in a cooler in Miami by Thursday and in a vase in Orlando by the weekend, and in the trash by Monday.
Live plants work differently. We grow ours in a greenhouse here, maintain them between events, and send them back out. There is a tree in our inventory that has been to a gala, two weddings, and a convention this year, and it's healthier than when it started. That's a sustainability story you can show a client with a photograph.
None of this means no cut flowers. It means knowing which is which, using living material where it works, and being able to say where the cut stems came from and where they go afterward.
What to ask: how much of the floral and greenery is living and reusable, and where is it grown?
Waste is what most people picture first, and it's the hardest of the four to actually do, because it isn't a design decision. It's logistics. Food, packaging, dead florals, serviceware, foam core signs, the carpet and drape that come out at strike at one in the morning when everybody wants to go home. If the composting, recycling, and donation channels weren't set up before the event, they are not going to get invented at strike. I have watched that not happen many times.
The question worth asking isn't "did we recycle." It's "of everything we produced, how much stayed out of the landfill." That's a percentage. Once you have it, you can move it.
What to ask: what is the plan for food, florals, and materials at the end of the night, and who is responsible for it?
Everything in the room came from somewhere. The roses from a farm, the linen from a mill, the lumber from a forest, the shrimp from a pond. Sourcing means knowing where, at least roughly, and preferring suppliers whose practices you would be comfortable describing out loud to a client.
It is the least visible of the four and, in my experience, the one that separates people who understand this from people who are performing it. You do not have to audit everybody. You have to ask, prefer the ones who can answer, and be honest about the ones you don't know yet. We are still working on this ourselves. I'll say more about that in the sourcing guide, because it's most of what Sense of Source is about.
What to ask: where did this come from, and can the supplier tell us how it was produced?
A few things get called sustainability that aren't, or aren't on their own. Worth being blunt about these, because they are the things that get a company called out.
I put measuring and truth-telling into the definition on purpose. Without a number, sustainability is a feeling, and feelings don't survive a procurement review. You don't need software to start. Take the four areas, pick one thing you can count in each (how much of the design was rental, how much of the greenery was live and came back, how much of the waste stayed out of the landfill, how much of the spend went to suppliers who can tell you where things came from), write it down for five or six events, and you have a baseline. We are doing exactly this at Florida Fresh right now, and I will publish the numbers on this site when they're real, not before.
The number is also what lets you talk to a client without flinching. "We kept sixty percent of this event out of the landfill and we're working toward seventy-five" is a sentence a planner can repeat to her boss. "We're very green" is not.
Most clients aren't asking for this because they don't know how, and most of us aren't offering it because we didn't know how to explain it. Now you do. Walk the client through the four areas in roughly this order: reuse first, because it saves them money and gets their attention; living material second, because it's beautiful and they can see it; waste third, because their guests will notice; sourcing last, because it's the part that makes the other three believable.
You won't get all four right the first time. We didn't. The point is to make the choices on purpose, count what happened, and do a bit better next time. That's what sustainable means in an event. The rest of this site is detail.
What you can claim, what you can't, and why modest and true beats sweeping.
How to raise it, how to answer "does it cost more," and how to frame choices as value.
SUSTAINABLE EVENTS. CHOICES THAT MATTER.