Circular Conference Toolkit. Case study ERSCP 2019

Abstract

Conference and events are fully integrated in the cities’ economic activity. They are highly valued as catalyst and place marketers, promoting tourism, talent-attraction, and prestige of the city. Considering sustainability, they can make critical choices regarding location, accessibility, mobility options, catering, materials selection, and power supply to have a positive influence not only on the local environment, but also to avoid embodied impacts in the form of CO2 emissions, land and water use. Due to the rapid rising of this activity, the general aim of this thesis is to design the “Circular Conference Toolkit” to be used as a guide to facilitate and provide tools for organizing more sustainable conferences and events. The Circular Conference Toolkit works to lower carbon emissions (carbon neutrality), to reduce and recirculate waste (towards zero waste), and to increase sustainability awareness amongst the participants (sustainable consumption). Following the Action-Research methodology, this thesis takes the 19th ERSCP Conference (15-18 October 2019, UPC, Barcelona) as case study to test the Circular Conference Toolkit. The conference participants take part in all the phases of the process. From asking them ideas and expectations to testing the Circular Conference Toolkit during the conference and finally making a post-event evaluation. The process is divided in three cycles; the first one is the research phase, it explores the state of the art of sustainable and "circular" events. The second cycle develops the case study -ERSCP 19-. Different sections compose it with a variety of methodologies depending on each approach: Stakeholders Analysis, UPC location Analysis, Participants brainstorming, Co-creation with students´ group and a Co-Decision Matrix Workshop. The third Cycle is the post-conference evaluation. It presents an assessment of the sustainable initiatives applied during the ERSCP 19 Conference. The result is the Circular Conference Toolkit, a set of 37 simple guidelines divided by topics and areas of action. It represents an open process of collaboration and reflection where the conference participants, the expertise committee, students and providers are all included. The future aim is to implement it to more conferences at UPC, and also, to scale it to other conference’s scenarios. Keywords: