Eco-Friendly Badging for Sustainable Events

Events can consume a lot of energy and produce a serious amount of waste. The typical conference attendee produces 1.89kg of waste per day. Of that, over 60% is landfill.

A broad awareness of climate change's negative effects, poor waste management and unsustainable energy consumption extends to attendees who expect event organisers to maximise sustainable materials and minimise waste. In 2020, a survey found that 60% of event attendees expressed a preference for events that used sustainable practices, with "over 25% strongly preferring such conferences."

What Does a Sustainable Event Look Like?

The notion of 'event greening' has been around for a while, but essentially it means creating an event with a minimal ecological footprint by using sustainable practices.

Sustainable practices can be wide-ranging, from reducing air travel by offering a hybrid event experience to providing biodegradable paper coffee cups.

What We're Doing

CrowdComms takes its environmental responsibilities seriously. Part of our service development remit is to provide sustainable solutions that help event planners produce eco-friendly events with a minimal environmental impact.

Over the last ten years, we've helped thousands of events reduce paper usage through our industry-leading event app. The CrowdComms app acts like a virtual brochure that contains dynamic and interactive features, including agendas, maps and even multi-page abstracts. No paper needed!

We've since turned our attention to making our badge processing as sustainable as possible.

Eco-Friendly Badging

CrowdComms' eco-friendly badges deliver the look and durability of traditional name badges while keeping a focus on event sustainability.

When researching the material to use, we looked for options that would meet our eco-objectives, without compromising durability or image quality.

Name Badges

We've replaced the single-use plastic pouch and updated it with more eco-friendly reinforced recyclable paper.

Tough and durable, the paper badges are strong enough to last for multi-day events and don't compromise on print quality.

Easy to print via our lightning-fast badge printing kiosks, the badges simply clip onto your event lanyard.

Tip: At the end of your event, have disposal bins available at exit points so attendees can easily hand over their badges for recycling.

Lanyards

Traditionally, lanyards were made from single-use plastics on non-biodegradable materials such as nylon.

Developments in lanyard production technology have produced big improvements in sustainability. Sustainable lanyards look just as good as their plastic counterparts but are much kinder to the environment.

Two material options to look for when choosing your lanyards are recycled PET or bamboo fibre:

• Recycled PET has an endless life cycle! Derived from plastic PET bottles, the fibres are extracted and spun into a durable yarn. The ability to keep recycling PET over and over is an effective way of avoiding the crude oil and natural gas extraction required for new plastics.
• Bamboo fibre is natural, biodegradable and sourced from fast-growing, sustainable crops. It produces a hard-wearing but soft yarn that feels and looks great.

Both options deliver superior print quality to ensure your event or sponsor brand has high visibility and impact and because these lanyards offer great durability, if you want to re-use them for next year's event, you can.

Badge-Printing

So now you have a great looking badge and lanyard combination, let's take a look at the printing process. CrowdComms have made badge printing more environmentally friendly!

CrowdComms' smart badge-printing kiosks use touch-screen or QR code technology. No need for printed tickets; scanned details can be downloaded straight to attendees' mobile devices.

The kiosks also print-on-demand, which means less paper waste as only the badges that are needed get printed.

Want an eco-friendlier badge, printing and lanyard option at your next event? Get in touch!