AGF Insider: Trends And Best Practices In Sustainability With Rob Van Wegen
Welcome to AGF Insider, our exciting series where we bring you monthly interviews with industry experts.
Each month we catch up with an industry leader in the sustainability world to find the current trends and best practices
This month we catch up with Rob van Wegen, Sustainability Coordinator at ESNS.
What are the best practices that you are seeing give the best results?
The practices that find best results are those that form into a structure that can be repeated and scale up as a business. Beautiful examples can have their function by pushing the boundaries, but if they don’t lead to anything that can be copied and multiply, the impact is limited. I really enjoy seeing this in the energy sector where the usage of batteries or HVO become more regular instead of examples.
I believe we are great in the start-up phase and launching new initiatives and ideas, but we can still grow in the scale-up phase to make a bigger and long-lasting impact.
What trends are you seeing this year?
The continuous shift from backstage solutions to more front stage solutions, more organisations dare to take actions than involve the visitors. In the Netherlands we have regulations to use hard cups or rPet at event, so this helps this push. But I also see it elsewhere, and not only at cups, also a reusable tableware and travel initiatives for visitors. With this focus on visitors I also see the increase in social sustainability projects on site.
What are the obstacles?
This depends of course, but there are two I want to highlight:
- The first is the amount of time that we have versus the change that needs to happen. Especially with behaviour change, we know this takes time, and that is time we don’t have. We need to adjust our acceleration just right to make sure we make maximum progress without losing the people (or their motivation) in our process.
- The second one is capability and opportunity that is not equal to all. Some parties grow quicker then other and that is okay for leading the way, but if the distance between the two gets to big, this will work against them. So we need to keep pushing to help others create an opportunity and grow capability to become more sustainable. This often begins by listening to their story.
What’s the next big thing in sustainability in events?
For a lot of challenges we already now a lot of alternatives like food and materials. Audience travel is still a big thing and with the continued shift to public action, and the development in the travel and transport industry I hope for next steps in this field, because this can have a huge impact.
What would be the biggest game changer from your perspective?
I am a big fan of the each one teach one strategy, we need to multiply our efforts and need to be open and transparant about our work and methods. If we find the energy to keep searching for new collaboration outside of our bubble and keep collaborating with new partners, we keep expending. We should keep asking ourselves what actions are best for society and stay vulnerable for other ideas, so we stay approachable to all that want to join the movement.
