It’s a great achievement to get everyone on board with sustainability, are there any particular stand out moments / recent events that you are most proud off? 
I was saying this very same thing in one of my previous answers. It is really frustrating to be trying to fight the good fight and implement changes that will improve the environment for the future, but without the funding to make this happen it is nearly impossible. There is no doubt a lot of the sustainable substitutions can be more expensive and trying to persuade stakeholders of the benefits are very difficult when they see it as loss of profits. In my experience, unfortunately without the buy in from stakeholders and the people who ultimately sign off the spend, you will not be able to make any significant changes. My advise would be to do the best you can do and implement that small changes you can. Maybe try and pull together a presentation for the stakeholders that will show them the benefits for the company?
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I think I am most proud of the all round changes I have made to our events portfolio across the board. I created a check list for the event managers to fill out for each of their events (which evolved over the year) and this was how we could benchmark. We started by concentrating heavily on a couple of areas and tried to make as many changes as we could to F&B and materials waste. The team were good at pushing our suppliers for answers and holding them to account. When we looked back at the improvements we had made over the year we were really pleased e.g. for all of our events we managed to eradicate the use of PVC banners and instead use either cardboard to a material that was biodegradable.
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Really encouraging to see that your team were motivated to do this and good advice to try and focus on a few areas first rather than attempt everything 
Thanks Alex, that’s very helpful and I do hope with Covid 19 sustainability will also become more important to stakeholders and they are more open to changes. It’s difficult if we as event managers are passionate about it and would like to make changes but have to be patient with it.
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That’s a wrap folks! Thank you for your questions and thank you to Alex for hosting this Ask Me Anything session, some really helpful answers!
If you have any more questions for Alex, you can contact her on here @Alex or on LinkedIn.
Join us again next week for our Ask Me Anything Session on Tuesday 2nd June at 4pm.
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Thanks Alex! Similar ideas to Alex to be truthful, and agree it is incredibly difficult. Most places I’ve worked have had a similar model but for some events one particular company used to fly it’s employees to an event for an extra pair of hands but then they would end up being sat in an office working on something else and had no interest in the live event, so from that point of view utilising hosts/event staffing companies who do general event support/reg/hosting etc is a better option. Same with local suppliers etc where possible to reduce the freight impact
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