Sustainable Events Guide: Give your large event a ... - ICLEI Europe

Message from Director-General,
UNON
Since its founding in 1996, the United Nations Office at Nairobi, a major
conference facility and venue for numerous meetings every year, has been
at the forefront of efforts to make meetings as sustainable as possible.
UNON pursues that goal through many means such as providing shuttle
buses for meeting participants, requiring caterers to comply with solid waste
management standards, recycling unused publications and donating them to
Kenyan schools, and recycling all plastic, paper and other solid waste through
no-fee contracts with private sector recycling companies.
With the aim of enabling others to adopt its good practices, in 2008 UNON
collaborated with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to
produce the first ever guide to green meetings published by a United Nations
organisation. The guide was launched at the 2008 International Annual
Meeting on Language Arrangements, Documentation and Publications
(IAMLADP) and made available on the websites of UNEP and other United
Nations bodies. In 2008 UNON Conference Services Division was the first
to obtain ISO 14001:2004 Environmental Management System (EMS)
certification for sustainable print and digital publications and services. For
many years now, UNON Conference Services Division has been supporting
paper-smart meetings, saving many trees and millions of litres of water.
At the 2010 IAMLADP there was talk of expanding the green meetings guide
to encompass conferences of over two thousand participants, and at the 2011
IAMLADP it was agreed that a guide for such conferences was needed, both
for United Nations bodies and for other major international organisations.
UNON is pleased to announce that it has responded to the call from
IAMLADP by producing, along with UNEP and ICLEI – Local Governments
for Sustainability (ICLEI), the “Sustainable Events Guide”, which provides
much valuable information on how to keep large scale meetings as green
as they can be. We trust that you and your organization will find the Guide
to be innovative and informative, and we believe that it will become a musthave
tool for those responsible for the planning and conduct of large-scale
conferences and other events.
On behalf of UNON I wish to thank all those who participated in the
preparation of the Sustainable Events Guide.
Sincerely,
Ms. Sahle-Work Zewde, Director-General, UNON
Sustainable Events Guide
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