ew organizations would be willing to risk their exhibit-marketing budgets on a house of cards, but that’s exactly what the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems (Syracuse CoE) did at the 2007 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Chicago. A community of more than 200 businesses and institutions in central upstate New York that fosters sustainable innovations in environmental and energy systems, buildings, and urban environments, Syracuse CoE was asked by one of its partners, National Grid, an electricity provider, to use Greenbuild to brand the central upstate region as a flourishing habitat for businesses that wanted to go Green. But there was just one problem: The organization itself was, well, green when came to Green exhibiting.

Even though it had exhibited at the 2006 Greenbuild show, the 10-by-10-foot exhibit was about as Green — and as bland — as a slice of preservative-filled Wonder Bread. “We decided to get creative and make a radical departure from the previous year’s booth,” says Martin Walls, the communications manager for Syracuse CoE.

	FAST FACT Exhibitors claim the second largest obstacle to Greening their exhibits, behind price, is a lack of available alternatives.

When Walls began searching for a replacement, he did what all good businesspeople do when they want to think outside the box: He Googled like a high-school student with a term paper due the next day. “We searched for sustainable exhibits and didn’t find anything,” he says, reflecting an experience common to exhibitors who try to find Green alternatives. After all, according to “An Inconvenient Booth,” exhibitors claim the second largest obstacle to Greening their exhibits, behind price, is a lack of available alternatives.

Eventually, Walls’ quest turned up a company in Michigan that could have built a Green exhibit; however, this particular solution would have just created another problem. “Building it in Michigan, then shipping it to Chicago for Greenbuild, then back to Michigan, and all over the country for any other shows if and when we reused it wouldn’t be very sustainable,” Walls says, especially with current estimates that transportation and logistics can account for up to 75 percent of a company’s carbon footprint. In fact, based on EPA estimates, just the round trip for a fully loaded tractor-trailer from Detroit to Chicago and back would spew about 6,922 pounds of CO² emissions into the air, or about 15.7 percent of what the average U.S. household produces in an entire year.

But in his quest for a newer, Greener property, Walls knew he had to find a suitable home for his existing one. So, practicing what it preaches, Syracuse CoE put its old vinyl-and-steel booth to use as an exhibit on sustainability in Syracuse’s Carousel Center mall instead of tossing it into a landfill. What’s more, Syracuse plans to repurpose the old exhibit’s steel frame for future use.

Class Act

With the clock ticking and his choices dwindling, Walls had one of those eureka moments when the LED light bulb goes off over your head. Since education is one of the pillars of the sustainability movement, thought Walls, why not use students to design and fabricate a sustainable exhibit?

FAST FACT Transportation and logistics can account for up to 75 percent of a company’s carbon footprint.

Walls and colleague Sara Pesek approached the Industrial and Interaction Design department at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, where he asked program coordinator Donald Carr if his fourth-year students (who typically are assigned a major design project in that year) might be interested in taking the exhibit on as their project. Intrigued by the proposal, Carr handpicked five charges that took up the challenge with the determination and creativity of Harold and Kumar going to White Castle.

The team researched Green materials such as Plyboo and Kirei Board (made from sorghum stalks that remain after the plant is harvested). They also contacted a Chicago exhibit house to see if they could use leftover parts from any used exhibits they were dismantling, since they considered constructing a booth out of existing materials they could re-purpose. But after much discussion, none of the ideas seemed daring enough — or practical, given the six-week lead time Walls and Pesek had given them.

	Chairs in the booth were made of a bamboo and soybean resin composite, and topped off with old T-shirts.

Ultimately, what Carr and his students created stood out at Greenbuild like an Amish farmer at the International Consumer Electronics Show: A 20-by-20-foot exhibit with 10-foot walls made of 16-by-9-inch die-cut cardboard cards with slots cut into them so they could be fitted together into a Jenga tower-like house of cards.

It’s in the Cards

Made from recycled cardboard by a Chicago printer, the 1,500 cards were more than an unexpected solution to the Green-exhibiting challenge. Printed with the organization’s logo in environmentally safe ink on one side and information about the group on the other, the cards did triple duty as giveaways, informative promotional literature, and a quasi-experiential activity whereby attendees slowly but surely dismantled the booth over the four-day show.

As the attendees walked away with the oversized cards, the exhibit’s shrinking profile triggered even more passersby to stop in. “We encouraged people to take cards away with them,” Walls says. “We didn’t want to ship anything back to Syracuse.”

But the cardboard walls were only one element of the booth’s sustainability. The floor visitors stepped on was made of Flor, a modular carpet tile from Interface Flor Inc., another Greenbuild exhibitor. Made of 80-percent post-consumer fibers, the flooring was later donated by Syracuse CoE to the South Chicago Chamber of Commerce, which installed it in a community center. The booth’s four chairs, coffee table, and four light boxes were made from bamboo and soybean resin composite, while the chairs’ cushions were made of T-shirts purchased at — and later returned to — the Salvation Army. Information about Syracuse CoE in the 12-by-8-inch light boxes was illumined by LEDs and compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which burn approximately 80 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and can last up to 15 to 30 times longer.

Still, a Green booth with a non-Green energy source is like an organic food co-op powered by a coal-burning plant. “Most trade shows are a mass of PCs and flat-screen TVs sucking energy,” Walls says. “That’s not very sustainable.” So Syracuse CoE eschewed most lighting, preferring to bask in the glow of the exhibit hall’s lights themselves. But it still needed to power the bulbs in the four light boxes featuring information on the organizations, so Carr and company developed a special in-house energy source that also became an in-booth activity.

One of Carr’s students found instructions on a Web site for turning a bicycle into a power generator. While one bike wouldn’t have been enough to energize a normal assortment of lights for the booth — Carr estimates it would have taken five people on five bikes cycling continually to accomplish that — the pedal-pushing idea could generate enough juice to illume the LEDs and the CFLs inside the light boxes. The stationary bike was a graphic demonstration of Syracuse CoE’s commitment and ingenuity — and a tool for breaking the ice between staff and attendees. “It was like the old country fair, where people competed to see who could swing the mallet hard enough to hit the bell,” Walls says. During the five hours the booth was open each day, there was rarely a moment when the bicycle seat wasn’t filled by an attendee pedaling away and powering the lights.

	FAST FACT Kirei board is made from stalks of the sorghum plant left over after it’s harvested, then mixed with nontoxic adhesives.

As the exhibit shrunk and the Greenbuild attendees carried it away, piece by piece, it became clear the booth’s plain-brown-wrapping simplicity and novelty had made it a media and crowd favorite. Hoping to be mentioned in one or two stories in major news outlets, Syracuse CoE received coverage by the Chicago Sun-Times, Syracuse’s Post-Standard, MSNBC, the BBC, and China’s Xinhua News agency.

Just as important, the booth left a minimal ecological footprint. Visitors generated the booth’s electricity. Syracuse CoE donated the carpet tile. Walls ordered just 600 copies of the handout from Collaborating for a Sustainable Future (which used recycled paper printed with soy ink, of course), guessing correctly that he would run out before the show was over and not have to ship any of them home. And Syracuse CoE’s booth visitors took the booth walls home with them.

Syracuse CoE shipped just three pallets to the show, half the number it used in 2006, despite the fact the 2007 booth was four times larger. It shipped only one back, putting the leftover cards to good use as packing material in and around the sole pallet. Sustainable and successful, the Syracuse CoE booth proved that sometimes, getting taken apart by your customers is a good thing.