STANDARD BEARER: Industry consultant and educator Sue Tinnish has played a key role in shepherding the APEX standards through the arduous process of gaining consensus approval. She expects the standards to create new opportunities for meeting planners within organizations and with clients. “This is the perfect opportunity,” she said, “to stand up and show leadership.”
When Sue Tinnish and Lawrence Leonard, CMP, bounded onto the stage at the Green Meeting Industry Council’s 2011 Annual Meeting in Portland this past February to talk about the upcoming launch of the APEX/ASTM Environmentally Sustainable Meeting Standards, they did so to the strains of Rod Stewart singing, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
They were kidding, of course. The standards, which were
created by a Convention Industry Council (CIC)–led team of 200 meetings-industry volunteers working with the Environ- mental Protection Agency and ASTMInternational, have been called a lot of things. Daunting, for one. They describe, in detail, actions for achieving and measuring sustainability in nine industry areas: accommodations, audiovisual produc- tion, communications and marketing, destinations, exhibits, food-and-beverage, meeting venue, on-site offices, and trans- portation. The APEX process has also been called painfully slow, because the release of the standards has been antici- pated for months. (See “What’s Taking So Long?,” p. 61.) But sexy? Not so much. It’s not hard to see why. The new standards tend heavily
toward metrics and measurement, and are the result of end- less—and endlessly painstaking—conversations about top- ics that include the “tensile strength of cement,” according to Tinnish, the ASTM/APEX liaison. When “you get into the nuts and bolts of individual line-item requirements,” added Leonard, CIC’s APEX program director, “there’s no denying that the technical wording is dry.” Increasingly, however, the standards are being perceived
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less as a set of geeky guidelines and more as a unique— and, yes, exciting—opportunity to align industry initiatives and goals, so that when it comes to sustainability issues, all oars are pulling in the same direction.
‘A Single, Unified Scorecard’ As it is, “what one meeting planner calls a green meeting, another will not,” said Ian Lipton, chief operating officer for the Toronto-based Carbon Accounting Company, which tracks and reports on environmental impacts.With the release of the standards, said Lipton, who helped develop them, the meetings industry will have “a meaningful way to truly gauge its environmental impact.” Added NancyWilson Zavada, CMP, a co-founder of the
Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) and founder of Portland, Ore.–based MeetGreen, which was one of the first meeting-planning companies to integrate sustainability into its business practices and to develop metrics that meas- ured the environmental impacts of meetings: “Finally, in 2011, the meetings industry will have an answer to the question, what does it mean to be green?” There are few industries for which it’s more important to