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CHANGE AGENT: The APEX “Green Meeting Standards” morphed into “Environmentally Sustainable Meeting Standards” after critics pointed out the limitations ofthe word green and its association with green- washing, said Lawrence Leonard, CMP, APEX program director for the Convention Industry Council.
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have an answer to that question. As a generator of waste, meetings come in second only to the construction industry. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, a Swedish cancer researcher and the founder of The Natural Step, a global nonprofit environ- mental education organization whose strategic framework has been used by numerous businesses and organizations, including Nike and The Boeing Company, is unequivocal on the significance of this issue. “It’s impossible to create a sus- tainable world,” Robèrt said at the GMIC Annual Meeting,
What’s Taking So Long?
When the volunteers working with CIC’s APEX program to create environmentally sustainable meeting standards submitted them to a vote by ASTM International’s sustain- ability committee in 2009, they thought that the process was almost complete. Instead, it was just beginning. The APEX standards must be approved by ASTM Interna-
tional, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, which was created in 1898 to address a national problem of breaking rail lines. Since then, the organization has become the world’s largest developer of voluntary technical standards. As such standards go, “they are the gold label,” said Sue Tinnish, who serves as a liaison between APEX and ASTM. But unlike industries such as manufacturing and construction, meetings don’t have a long history with techni- cal standards. An organization such as ASTM is “linear and uses a consensus process,” Tinnish said, designed for proce- dures that guard against bridge collapses and other disasters. “Our industry is fun and interesting and experience-oriented. You can see how the two worlds could collide.” When ASTM’s sustainability committee voted on the first draft two years ago, committee members had more than
600 criticisms—each of which had to be addressed. Those comments resulted in major revisions to the standards, Tinnish said, and ultimately improved them. “Clearly,” she said, “the standards are stronger than anything we could have created just in the [meetings] industry itself.” But it’s been a long road. The revised standards were
voted on again in January 2011, which resulted in about 90 negative comments. Those have been answered, and the stan- dards will be voted on during a 30-day period that began last month. But even assuming that the ASTM sustainability com- mittee votes to pass them, the standards still will have to be approved by ASTM’s leadership. Tinnish said: “It’s not like the standards will be passed and appear on the CIC website the next day.” The impatience that some meeting professionals are
feeling is understandable, Tinnish said. “A lot of us are inter- ested in testing that our meetings meet the standards at a cer- tain level.” But she urges planners and suppliers to take a long view when thinking about sustainability. “It’s really about the journey,” Tinnish said. “The standards are a pathway—not just the prize.”
“without creating sustainable meetings.” The challenge of sustainability—for every industry
and every institution—has more to do with competence, Robèrt said, than values. Few people would say that there’s no need for sustainability, or that the problem of declining natural resources is going away. Nor do people ignore or oppose sustainability because they’re greedy and want to make “short-term bucks while screwing the planet,” Robèrt said. Instead, “they refuse to hear this
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