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Ask Mr. Green
 My company is asking our exhibit producer to enter the Zero Waste Challenge. But what exactly do you mean by waste?
What a great question. Waste is easier to see than define. When you kick a pile of packing materials aside during set-up, you know that it's waste. When you buy a new product and toss a mountain of packaging away, that's waste too.
This seems simple enough, especially when packing materials can be reduced, reused, or recycled – or when recycled materials can be chosen in the first place. Unfortunately, recycled packing materials have yet to catch on in our industry.
Waste That's Built In
But what about your carpet? You buy carpet in 12-foot-wide roles. Since booths are measured in 10-foot increments, the carpet is cut down to 10-foot-wide strips. The rest is waste. A small fraction is necessary: Carpet comes with ragged edges that need to be trimmed. But most of the cut-off is an unfortunate byproduct of difference between booth sizes and carpet rolls.
Sometimes product dimensions force hard choices. I once heard a designer argue that a set of displays should be 8.5-feet tall because the proportions just looked right – they created enough space to enhance the exhibitor's logo above the product displays.
To the builder, however, those extra few inches meant buying 10-foot rather than 8-foot pieces of plywood. Using just one-quarter of the extra material would have resulted in higher costs, plus a lot of useless plywood scraps that the shop would have discarded. In this case, the builder insisted that the designer rethink the project to avoid wasting materials and money.
Competitive Waste
During the high-flying 1980s and 90s, though, companies often bought extravagant solutions. In the fight to look fresh, innovative, and successful, building big, flashy, intriguing designs offered competitive advantages. In those days "design conceits" were common.
For example, one company's high-end car stereos were displayed on three layers of color-core laminate. Color core is a very expensive version of plastic laminate that doesn't have that thin brown edge. Three sheets of different colors were stacked and cut on angles to create three very thin, very subtle stripes.
Honestly, designers love details like these. Yet they require big budgets from exhibitors who see design details as a way to compete in the marketplace. The global recession reset a lot of people's thinking, and today this design conceit probably seems wasteful.
Wasteful Habits
But is it any different than printing brochures for distribution at events? Since most trade show collateral ends up in hotel trashcans, smart companies are redefining printed paper as waste.
Even so, some exhibitors have trouble letting go of old habits. For them, the act of handing a cut sheet to a prospect completes a sales conversation. This is an instance in which sales training might be a financially and environmentally sound investment.
Roadside Waste
Waste also means pollution. It's an unfortunate side effect of the things we do. Trucking pollution is an excellent example. Since heavy trucks get about five to eight miles per gallon, we burn a lot of fuel and create a lot of air pollution by shipping exhibits to shows.
Look for solutions in logistics. For example, if you can use the same exhibit at multiple shows and store it at warehouses along the way, you can reduce the number of miles driven in a year. Even combining two or three shows into a circuit reduces waste. You'll save on transportation costs too.
So What Does "Zero Waste" Mean?
The Exhibit Designers and Producers Association's Zero Waste Challenge doesn't provide just one answer. It's a design competition. The judges will be looking for great designs that achieve marketing goals while simultaneously reducing waste in some or all of these categories. Zero Waste is an opportunity to think big, get creative, and look at the value of exhibit marketing in new, cost-effective, and environmentally sound ways.
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Tom Bowman, president of Bowman Global Change in Signal Hill, CA, works with national institutions on climate change and sustainability communications and is a frequent speaker on improving public
engagement in climate and energy issues. As a green business consultant, he advises companies on cost-effective sustainability actions and has won multiple awards for developing and implementing his own firm's successful green business plan. tom@bowmanglobalchange.com
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