MICEBOOK - POWER 50 GREEN CHAMPIONS COVER 1 - Flipbook - Page 14
Page 14
Kate Vandenburg
Marketing & Communications
Director, Business Design Centre
Over the last fifteen years since joining the
Business Design Centre (BDC), Kate has
developed from an entry-level position in
events and sitting on the inaugural ‘Green
Team’, to affecting change at the highest
level.
When Kate joined the BDC Board in 2018,
she started a new look marketing function,
and began to use her position to create
change and participate more heavily in
the company’s sustainability strategy. She
signed up to the B Corp movement in 2021
and the BDC became B Corp Certified in
Summer 2023. She also presented to the
local business improvement district
alongside her CEO, following which, a
cohort of ten other local companies
began their own B Corp journeys.
Kate set up a ‘Donate Not Waste’
campaign, which sees reusable items (not
limited to; clothes, food, event products
and exhibitor items) left over after events
donated to places that will use them,
whilst also diverting them from waste. In
2022, she signed BDC’s commitment,
supporting the Net Zero Carbon Events
pledge and contracted carbon consultants, ecollective, to not only measure the
venue’s footprint, but to help navigate
what it would take to drive the business to
net zero, with science-based emissions
reduction targets.
She now works with Climate Impact
Partners on offsetting, whose verified
projects support the wider UN’s SDGs. All
the work she has been doing in recent
years was assimilated in BDC’s first ESG
report in 2022, and it was this piece of
work that won the ESG Award at the
Exhibition News Awards in March 2022. She
firmly believes that collaboration is key
and has joined events colleagues at the
Event Industry Alliance’s Cross Association
Sustainability Working Group, taking every
opportunity to share her learnings and
learn from others.
Katherine Bell
Louisa Watson
Director, Global Process &
Implementation, CWT Meetings and
Events
Director of Marketing, Wyboston
Lakes
Katherine led the team that developed a
global training program, alongside
partnering with Thrust Carbon to devise a
carbon calculator for meetings and
events.
As an organisation, CWT is committed to
reducing its overall environmental
impact, including setting its own charter,
signing up to the United Nations Global
Compact since 2012 and measuring its
own emissions. As a growing number of
clients demanded to know the CO2
generated in the business trips they
made, CWT partnered with Thrust Carbon
on the business travel side to calculate
the emissions of business travellers.
Katherine was keen to do the same by
developing a carbon emissions
calculator on the meetings and events
side. After working hard to gain internal
buy-in, she led a volunteer project team
inside M&E, who are as passionate and
committed as she is to the environment,
and who worked tirelessly testing, piloting
and training until the tool was launched.
The team worked closely with Thrust
Carbon to ensure they understood the
complexity of measuring the carbon
emissions of an event, and the many
components involved such as attendee
travel, venue, accommodation, food &
beverage, and helped them develop the
reporting functionality. Katherine then
worked with trainers to create a series of
webinars to educate the M&E teams in
sustainable events so they can guide
clients on how to lower the CO2
emissions of their events.
The carbon calculator was launched in
April 2023, and it enables users to
calculate the carbon footprint of their
attendees based on various activities
such as travel, hotel stays, meeting
space and meals, and organise the
individual activity calculations within
projects, clients and countries. Analytics
provide insights to help explain the
numbers, allowing clients to target areas
for reduction for both the current event
and future events, and compare their
emissions to similar events.
Louisa’s well-established commitment to
driving greater sustainability in the events
industry is evident both in the initiatives
and award-winning achievements of
Wyboston Lakes Resort and in the
sustainability events that she has initiated
for the industry as a director of industry
association HBAA/ beam.
Louisa played a key role in setting the
resort’s sustainability goals. These include
sending zero waste to landfill, which has
been achieved for six consecutive years,
achieving the highest levels in prestigious
event industry accreditation schemes
such as EcoSmart from Greengage
Solutions, the Green Tourism Awards and
the IACC, reducing carbon emissions by
50 per cent by 2025, which has already
been achieved, and achieving Net zero by
2040.
Wyboston Lakes has introduced various
technologies to prevent potential energy
wastage and is committed to eradicating
fossil fuels and ensuring all electric energy
is generated from renewable resources
on-site by 2026, which is part of a
four-year Green Energy Roadmap. It has
also introduced a 25-mile promise menu,
acquired a biodigester that processes
food waste to be used as compost on the
resort’s land, started re-wilding,
introduced beehives and created a nature
reserve in conjunction with The WildLife
Trust.
The accreditations and awards that the
resort has won are a great achievement
and Louisa was chosen by Greengage as
Sustainability Industry Champion. But
most important to her are the investment
into the Green Energy Plan which sees the
resort off grid by 2026 and the
Room2Grow initiative. This enables
eco-conscious guests staying more than
one night to have a tree planted on the
resort instead of having their room
cleaned, resulting in 20,000 trees planted
in just eight months.
As leader of beam’s sustainability
initiatives for several years, Louisa steered
the teams that created two full day HBAA
beam events dedicated to sustainability,
helping to keep the issues high on the
industry’s agenda and sharing best
practice.
