Most of us are familiar with recycling, so that it’s the obvious place to begin. In fact, the people you see pulling aluminum cans and paper out of the trash are often recruited for task forces like yours, even at some of the biggest companies. They might not have any technical training in sustainability; they are simply going with what they know. The good news is that recycling can take you a long way if you take advantage of all the opportunities it offers.

Unintended Side Effects

If you have ever listened to the lists of potential side effects in television ads for prescription medications you know that the benefits of medications always come with unintended risks. The same can be said for the products and materials we use every day in our exhibit programs.

Imagine what you might think if every exhibit proposal included similar warnings. “Using plywood may increase the risks of habitat destruction, stream pollution, and health problems for mill workers. Oil spills may accompany the use of plastics in some cases. Patients who use aluminum may be at higher risk due to rising energy prices, air and water pollution, and global warming, so ask your exhibit builder if aluminum is right for you.”

It might be hard to imagine seeing such disclaimers on exhibit proposals, but these environmental consequences are all too real. This is why the old slogan reads, “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

The best way to eliminate environmental risks is by using fewer resources in the first place. In practical terms, this means eliminating printed brochures and cutting down on packing materials, especially all those last-minute one-way shipping containers that make expedited journeys from your exhibit house to the dump with a brief layover on the show floor.

The overwhelming majority of printed brochures make the very same trip. Research shows that attendees leave nearly all printed literature behind when they check out of their hotels. Many exhibitors abandon their extra brochures too, rather than paying to ship them home. The route from forest to landfill can be a short one, so consider whether your company is gaining marketing or sales benefits that are worth the costs to your exhibit budget and the environment.

Reusing materials for as long as possible is more sustainable, and it is often more cost-effective too. Most companies replace exhibit properties years before they are worn out. A good strategy is to build part of your new exhibit out of your older panels and cabinets. They can be excellent resources if they are reconfigured and refinished, and using them as raw materials reduces the risks of unintended environmental harm. Another option is to contribute older exhibits to a custom rental program. Don’t forget to consider upgrading your existing exhibit with custom rental properties instead of building a new exhibit.

Circular Logic

We tend to think that recycling is the last step in the resource chain—as a way to reduce the amount of trash that piles up in local landfills. But the recycling logo is a circle by design. The circle signifies that recycling is another way to reuse raw materials and reduce the environmental side effects that accompany forestry, mining, and refining.

For some materials, such as aluminum, the recycling advantages are striking. Creating new aluminum from scratch takes an enormous amount of energy, which has consequences for pollution and global warming. Recycling aluminum requires just five percent of that energy. Like steel, aluminum can be recycled many times without degrading its quality. In fact, most of the aluminum that has ever been created is still in use today.

Worn out carpets offer similar advantages. Depending on your location, some carpet mills will haul your old carpet away and use it as raw feedstock for future production. You can contribute to this circle in two ways: by recycling your old carpets and buying new carpet that is high in recycled content. Virtually every carpet mill offers recycled content carpet, so ask your exhibit house to use them.

Plastics are worth recycling too even though their quality degrades along the way. Plastics are made of very long molecules, and those molecules break into smaller and smaller pieces each time they go through the recycling process. This is why old soda bottles become park benches and carpet when they are recycled rather than new soda bottles.

It is even more difficult to close the circle with cabinets and wall panels that are made of lumber. Recycling construction scraps is not a problem, but once a cabinet or panel is painted or covered with plastic laminate, separating the various materials and adhesives from the wood can be prohibitively difficult. Your best strategy is to reuse wooden properties for as long as you can. If possible, donate them to a local charity at the end of their useful life.

Shipping crates, cardboard boxes, and paper packing materials, on the other hand, can be recycled alongside construction scraps. While the best strategy is to use as little as possible in the first place, most of these products can be recycled when the time comes.

Balancing Tradeoffs

In a perfect world, we would enjoy the benefits of natural resources without any harmful side effects. In the real world, we face tradeoffs every day. You can enhance the benefits and minimize the risks by making your recycling program as thorough as possible. That old mantra, “reduce, reuse, recycle” has been around for a long time because it really works.

We live in a world of compromises and tradeoffs, and going Green is no exception. Life would be much easier if we could take a few simple steps and call our exhibits “Green.” Unfortunately, “Greener” is easier to define than “Green,” and companies that overstate their claims in an overzealous rush to become leaders risk a backlash from wary consumers.

With so many different approaches to Green in the marketplace, there is also plenty of room for honest mistakes even if you cautiously avoid misleading advertising. But you don’t need to let these concerns keep you from moving forward. The answer, in fact, is as simple as being honest.

When Greener isn’t Green

A classic example of mixed messages occurred at the Los Angeles Auto Show in 2007, when the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid won the Green Car Journal’s Green Car of the Year award. A full-size SUV winning the top Green accolade might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the hybrid Tahoe achieves an EPA-estimated 20 mpg, which is close to the national average for all makes and models on the road. Average fuel economy doesn’t seem especially Green. On the other hand, the hybrid Tahoe gets 25 percent better fuel economy than its conventional siblings. In other words, the Tahoe is significantly Greener than many other large SUVs, but calling it the “Green Car of the Year” when so many other vehicles on the road average 35 to 50 mpg seems a little odd. Too bad there wasn’t an award for most improved.

Were Chevrolet, the LA Auto Show, or the Green Car Journal guilty of greenwashing? From an environmental perspective, greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants are measured by a vehicle’s output per mile, and the atmosphere doesn’t care whether a vehicle has the lowest emissions in its class. Total emissions are all that matter. From a practical perspective, though, it might be unrealistic to think that SUVs will disappear anytime soon. A case can be made that improving SUV fuel economy is a step in the right direction. From a marketing perspective, where consumer perceptions are king, the “Green Car of the Year” claim comes across as counterintuitive and, possibly, disingenuous.

Greenwashing Defined

In the simplest terms, “greenwashing” means making false claims about environmental performance. It often boils down to marketing spin: putting a Green stamp on business as usual. Some products and processes are inherently Greener than others, of course, so some companies have an historical Green advantage. For example, aluminum exhibit components can be recycled into other aluminum products after their years on the show floor are over. But are they being recycled? Could some of those components be made from recycled aluminum in the first place? The answers vary, so perhaps “Greener” or “potentially Greener” would be a better moniker than “Green.”

Sometimes greenwashing means taking Greener actions out of context. For example, a company might build a new exhibit using certified sustainable lumber, low-VOC paint, recycled carpet, and energy-saving LED lights. But, if the company makes a habit of replacing exhibits every year or two, the use of Greener materials would be seriously undermined by the sheer volume being consumed.

Other times, greenwashing simply means jumping to conclusions that have not been proven. For example, Green catering often relies on serving foods from local sources. But, if those local foods are heavy on beef and dairy products, or they are not organically grown, the advantages of local sourcing are overwhelmed by the disadvantages of industrial agriculture. The Green claim is spurious, but since many caterers are unaware of the underlying science, the greenwashing might be accidental.

To make things even more challenging, there are many different definitions of “Green” in the marketplace today. For some, Green begins and ends with recycling, toxic chemicals, or carbon emissions; for others a sustainable business also supports community development and its local economy. Anticipating every possible angle is probably impossible, but there is an easier answer.

Just Talk Your Walk

Clif Bar, which is an established champion of environmental stewardship, publishes a statement of its environmental goals and annual performance. The company has yet to meet every goal, of course, and that’s the point. Rather than risk greenwashing, the company is forthright about its initiatives, successes, and obstacles. So, for example, while the company reduced packaging waste, it could not avoid using certain materials that are required by federal regulations. Likewise, when carbon emissions rise due to growth, the company publishes the data, just as it does in years when emissions fall because of green initiatives.

The lesson here is a simple one: Keep moving forward on your Green priorities, but keep your Green marketing in line with actual performance. Just tell people where you are going, how you plan to get there, and where you are on the journey. If everything works out, your company will be recognized as a Green leader. And when you encounter setbacks along the way, your company’s reputation will be protected from the hazards of rushing too quickly into making false claims.

It’s common wisdom that eating locally grown foods is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint. After all, food production has become a global business. We import produce from Latin America, meat from the Southern Hemisphere, dairy products from Europe, and on it goes. That’s a lot of miles. But food is also one of those areas where scientists are turning common wisdom on its head.

Two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University published the first comprehensive study of greenhouse gas emissions from food earlier this year. To their surprise, transportation only accounts for eleven percent of greenhouse gas emissions from food. The carbon footprint is dominated, instead, by the production phase where fertilizers and pesticides made from oil and natural gas are widely used. And in this phase, different food groups give very different results.

Where’s the Beef?

So, here’s the kicker that your executives might not want you to tell them: Red meat is around 150 percent more greenhouse-gas intensive than chicken or fish. The difference is so large, in fact, that shifting less than one day’s worth of calories per week from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or vegetarian choices reduces your carbon footprint more than buying everything you eat from local sources. That’s big. The good news is that if you can convince management to cut back on the cheese trays and tri-tips, carbon reductions are easy to come by.

This might be bad news for steak lovers, but the idea is catching on worldwide. The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently urged all nations to move away from a diet dominated by red meat and dairy. Why? A big reason is that cows emit methane, which has 20 times the global warming potential of CO2. As food ferments in their stomachs, cows exhale methane with every breath. Multiply this, plus methane from their waste products, plus the chemicals used to grow the cops they eat by a global population of nearly one billion cattle, and you get a significant contribution to global warming, pollution, and because of the drugs they are fed, even the emergence of antibiotic-resistant super-bugs. To make matters worse, people in developing countries are beginning to eat like we do, switching to beef-based diets, and placing new demands on a global food-production system that is already under stress. This is why so many experts are urging people to cut back on the beef, at least part of the time.

Buy Organic?

Yes, even though results vary, buying organic is still a good way to go. The fertilizers used to grow most crops eventually wash out to sea, where they enable algae to bloom. In more than four hundred ecosystems around the world, those well-fertilized algae are killing everything else, leaving dead zones in once-productive marine habitats. This is bad news for the world’s fisheries, most of which are already in decline and many of which have crashed altogether in recent years. The scarcity of popular fish has gotten serious enough to encourage some clever marketing: Slimeheads are now sold under the savory name orange roughy, and Patagonian toothfish now appear on menus as Chilean sea bass.

Organic farming is easier on the climate too, but the exact figures vary from crop to crop. Still, it’s easy enough to remember that organic foods use less fossil energy, preserve topsoil, and minimize the impacts of agriculture on the world’s oceans.

What Should I Serve?

The director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health puts it this way: Eat farther down the food chain. Not only will you reduce your environmental impact, you’ll be serving more healthful meals too. That sounds great if you’re a mother or a public health official, but you’ve got to sell the idea to your managers. Good luck.

Meanwhile, here’s a short list of tips to help you Green your catering.

• -  Serve less red meat.
• -  Serve fewer dairy products.
• -  Serve more chicken and fish.
• -  Serve sustainable seafood — “seafood watch” guides are available online.
• -  Serve more produce.
• -  Serve local foods if you can — 11 percent isn’t the biggest bite, but it’s more than a nibble.