MICEBOOK - POWER 50 GREEN CHAMPIONS COVER 1 - Flipbook - Page 15
Page 15
Lucie Ryan
Senior Sustainability Manager,
Informa
Louise Palmer
Sustainability Officer, Strata
Since becoming a mum in 2019, Louise’s
passion for sustainability has skyrocketed.
As the marketing manager responsible for
both internal and external comms, she set
about driving change that engaged both
clients and employees, and repositioned
Strata as an innovative agency making
positive changes to be more sustainable.
To get buy in from the wider business, she
formed a sustainability task force, bringing
together a group of employees from
across the company to brainstorm ideas,
and discuss best practices for
implementing change within their
business function. After a few months of
lobbying internally, and justifying the
investment by researching the wider
market, Louise achieved her first goal and
Strata joined isla as a member.
She then worked with the Strata design
team and put together a sustainability
best practice guide to share internally,
which breaks down the steps to follow to
ensure sustainability is embedded
throughout the event design process for
client work. She also created the ‘Strata
Sustainable Approach’ document to
communicate these goals to clients.
Strata’s continued relationship with isla
now includes adopting TRACE as a carbon
measurement tool, and the goal is to have
50 events tracked in the next 12 months.
Louise has been able to implement real
results which so far includes offsetting
over 81,000 company travel miles and
increasing recycling by 33%. With
confirmed business of over £600k from a
brand-new client adopting new
sustainable practices (which Louise
contributed to the pitch for), it’s clear that
these new ways of working aren’t just
good for the environment, they’re also
great for the business.
As a result of her commitment to
sustainability, Strata is now in the process
of applying for B Corp status, and Louise
has moved into the role of Sustainability
Officer.
As Senior Sustainability Manager, Lucie
has been instrumental in delivering
sustainability across many areas of the
business. This includes developing the
Informa Sustainable Event Fundamentals
– a framework to assess, measure,
improve and report the sustainability
performance of Informa’s 500+ global
trade shows and conferences, many of
which serve different markets in different
cultures.
In 2020, Informa’s Fundamentals needed
to be more ambitious to keep supporting
the top 50 events so they could go further
and faster. Lucie developed a 28-topic
maturity spectrum and trained the team
of sustainability specialists who work with
those events to rapidly accelerate their
sustainability ambitions across a broad
spectrum so that they could then be
shared and cascaded across other
events.
Hundreds of events, thousands of
colleagues and more than a thousand
submissions to the Fundamentals
framework over four years have demonstrated the credibility and usefulness of
this tool. Informa has seen the average
scores for events increase over time and
it’s become one of the few successful
cross-divisional initiatives. Led by Lucie,
the Fundamentals have been open
sourced to the wider industry to share the
learnings, and organisations like the
Association of Event Organisers have
already adapted it and used it elsewhere.
Lucie was also part of the small team that
helped initiate the event industry's largest
collaboration on climate change, the Net
Zero Carbon Events Initiative. Whilst it’s
been an industry-wide collabo- ration, the
overall structure and shape was highly
influenced by Lucie’s initial development
of the key principles of the Net Zero
Carbon Events Pledge and then the
framework behind it.
When the initiative was launched at
COP26 in Glasgow, more than 150 organisations had signed up, and now two years
after its launch, there are more than 500
member organisations from around the
world (representing an estimated 30% of
the entire global exhibitions market), all of
whom have pledged to halve their carbon
footprint by 2030.
Martin Ivell
Account Director, Cheerful
Twentyfirst
Martin Ivell plays a crucial role in
advocating for sustainable practices
within Cheerful Twentyfirst. Through the
development of its lead assessment tool
and carbon measurement programme,
he has developed the link between the
Steering Group and senior leadership
team and helped transform the agency
into a more environmentally conscious
and socially responsible agency.
Working internally with the project teams
and sustainability director, Martin has
helped to identify areas where
improvements can be made across the
business, such as energy consumption,
office waste management, and
procurement. He led the charge on client
adoption and understanding of the
agency’s new carbon programme and
was the first Account Director to boldly
broach new ways of working with clients,
getting feedback and input from a small
focus group of brands back in 2020.
Martin’s recent sustainability wins include
separating food waste and recycling in
offices with the eventual goal of
eradicating waste for incineration, roll out
of The Matrix, a comprehensive list of
reduction questions allowing all staff to
set their environmental and social impact
goals on a job-by-job basis, and adding
social and environmental Lead
Assessment questions to the AD’s
requirements. He led a conversation
recently around turning down one project
because of the brand’s environmental
impact.
Martin is also personally responsible for
actual and significant carbon emission
reductions for some of the agencies
longest clients. He recently delivered a
carbon neutral event for Vodafone for
over 1,000 global delegates and for a
different client, reduced their forecasted
carbon footprint by 50%. He has
encouraged new clients (with historically
high impact event emissions) to have
important conversations up their chain
and supported them closely through that
education.
