BeaconHouse Events, a leading events agency in Newcastle upon Tyne, has launched the first of its Sustainability Supply Chain roundtables, bringing together key regional events industry suppliers to discuss how the sector can work together to reduce our event carbon, meet sustainability targets, and drive sector-wide change.
The event, hosted by The Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Gateshead, brought together a variety of North East suppliers to discuss how the event industry can achieve more, together. Attendees came from a host of different organisations across the region, including venues, audio visual partners, and print solutions, and the discussion centered around the fact that global carbon emissions are at a critical point globally, with the events industry being responsible for up to 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
BeaconHouse is on a mission to drive sustainable change in the events industry, starting in the North East and from within the organisation. The team is motivated to collaborate and encourage and empower their team, clients, suppliers, and audiences to make positive changes.
Sarah Thackray, founder and director of BeaconHouse Events, said: “Rather than move away from those suppliers who haven’t quite nailed their sustainability strategies yet, we want to work with our community to support them, to learn from each other, and to inspire others working in the event space to do the same. The energy, ideas, and discussion in the room were fantastic; we talked about everything from energy, transport, eco-scoring supplier databases, menu carbon labeling, food waste, materials second use, navigating red tape, data collection, and carbon reporting and certification.
“Between November 2023 and January 2024, we surveyed businesses within our supply chain to discover what they believed to be their biggest challenges when it comes to sustainability. Energy was found to be the biggest concern for those surveyed with Transport and Mindset & Habits both identified as secondary importance when it came to the organisations’ event challenges. Together the group discussed areas in which they can influence delegate choices with many of the venues sharing tips for nudging behavioural change such as carbon calculating menus and management systems that award points to delegates for greener travel. Ingram AV, a trusted partner offering Audio Visual Solutions, also shared their movement towards greener energy via their solar-powered NRG innovation which has already resulted in a huge reduction of carbon at large-scale events.
“This isn’t a quick fix or big promise, we all know that there is a lot of work to do. This roundtable event marked the start of our five-step plan to reach Net Zero by 2030. Over the rest of 2024, we aim to share our vision with as many of our suppliers as possible and engage with them to understand how we can make progress together. By the end of the year, we will share a draft code of conduct for input, and ask our supply chain to commit to making considered and consistent change together. From here we aim to improve our data collection processes to make it as easy as possible for our suppliers to share accurate data with us. We will be moving towards collecting evidence of sustainable practices from the fantastic supplier teams that we work alongside.”
Between now and 2030 BeaconHouse Events will continue to track the organisation’s events’ carbon footprint using the TRACE tool and explore an eco-scoring system, both so suppliers can monitor their performance and as a method of creating a preferred supplier list to take into consideration their sustainable credentials. As an environmental focus around sustainability is only one part of ESG, BeaconHouse Events will also be adjusting processes to make sure that the supply chain is not only ethically lowering carbon across events, but also looking beyond carbon at added social value.
This first discussion was an exciting first step towards creating a sustainable and future-focused event supply chain in the North East, that can have an impact more widely across the UK. The next meeting will take place in May where participants can update on the success in tackling these challenges and discuss further measures that can be taken to reach ESG goals.
If you are interested in hearing more or taking part in the next roundtable event email sarah@beaconhouse-events.co.uk