The ENERGISE consortium is well aware of the fact that all our activities within the project have certain environmental burdens on our planet (CO2 emission, waste, energy use, etc. due to our project meetings, workshops, conferences, Living Labs, ordinary work in the office).
That is why we are trying to reduce these burdens and if possible compensate them in the following ways:
ENERGISE partner GreenDependent shared its green events checklist with the consortium that we all agreed to bear in mind when organizing our project meetings, workshops and the final project conference. You can download the checklist from here, or find it under the Resources menu;
We calculated the travel-related carbon footprint of our face-to-face project meetings and expert panel workshops. We publish the results of our calculations here, under the Walking the talk menu as follows:
- Project meetings: during the 3-year period of the ENERGISE project we had altogether 7 face-to-face meetings at 7 different places:
- Maastricht - Team Meeting
- Dublin - Team + Expert Meeting
- Helsinki - Team + Expert Meeting
- Copenhagen - Team + Expert Meeting
- Brussels - Review Meeting
- Budapest - Team Meeting
- Barcelona - Final Conference
- Calculation of the meetings' carbon footprint: At the end of the ENERGISE project GreenDependent Institute calculated the components of the travel carbon footprint (in km) as well as the carbon footprint of all the meetings (in CO2) as seen below in the case of the Maastricht meeting as an example:
- We also calculated the per participant of the ENERGISE team meetings' carbon footprint to illustrate the ratio of carbon footprint per person in the case of each meetings. This diagram shows the locations which are accessible with lower and higher CO2-emissions. We note that during the organisation of meetings there might be an important factor to find places that are more accessible by train, or are located in relatively close to the project partners:
- The following figure shows the overall carbon footprint of all ENERGISE meetings, including the travel-related carbon footprint of the project team members only. It shows that the entire travel-related carbon footprint of the team members was 37.56 tons carbon-dioxide, the 97% of which came from flying-related emissions:
- The figure below shows the overall carbon footprint of all ENERGISE meetings, including the travel-related carbon footprint of the project team members and experts (Experts are Members of ENERGISE (international) Expert Panel and other invited local experts). It shows that the entire travel-related carbon footprint was 72.32 tons carbon-dioxide:
The figure below shows the ratio of carbon footprint for each travelling method (plane, bus, car, local public, train). The data show which locations can be approached easier by train.
In addition to the calculation of the travel-related carbon footprint we also paid attention to several green considerations during the organisation of project meetings such as:
- We tried to reduce the number of face-to-face meetings and have online calls instead;
- If printing is necessary, we tried to use environmentally friendly / recycled paper for printing our materials, flyers, brochures, etc.;
- We tried to arrange organic / Fair Trade / local food and drink at our meetings, workshops (see the picture as an example for this from our kick-off meeting in Maastricht in February 2017);
- The green meeting organisation best practice ideas we use are simple but great:
Glasses and mugs were labelled with names so as to avoid the generation of too much dirty dishes at the end of the day
Indoor temperature was metered with a thermometer to avoid the overheating of the lecture room
Tap water was served instead of bottled mineral water to reduce the amount of waste generated
- We seeked out environmentally and socially aware accommodation when we need to travel;
- Following GreenDependent’s practice, we planted native fruit trees at the end of the project to compensate for ENERGISE events in Hungary together with the Hungarian ENERGISE Living Lab participants;
- Finally, we regularly discuss and communicate our efforts in this regard both within and outside the consortium.
To read reports on how we „walk the talk”, please read our short article:
If you wish to find out more about our responsible event organization and travel practices, please write to us at info@energise-project.eu.
Edina and Kristóf Vadovics, GreenDependent Institute
Pictures: ©ENERGISE Consortium and GreenDependent Institute