Sydney Convention Centre Is a Green Globe Winner

The Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre has embarked on a new drive to boost environmental awareness in the business events sector, through its involvement in a government sustainability program. The centre has signed up for an 18-month New South Wales Government Sustainability Advantage Program in order to identify new measures that will help the venue and its clients achieve a better environment. Operated by the Department of Environment and Climate Change, the program is designed to boost business understanding of sustainability and assist in the identification and management of present and future environmental issues, with a particular focus on energy efficiency.

Participation in this scheme is expected to raise the center’s bar higher and help discover new ways that can reduce the impact of events on the environment. The centre has been a leader in environmental practices over the past six years. Since 2003 it has increased recycling volumes by 184% annually and in 2008 it recycled an impressive 46% of its exhibition waste stream. Its efforts to divert material from landfill prevented the creation of 636 tones of greenhouse gas – an achievement equivalent to taking 298 cars off Australian roads for a year.

The Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre is one of the first Australian venues, and one of only a handful worldwide, to have undertaken the accreditation process and in becoming a silver Green Globe benchmarked venue. This comes two years after the centre became one of the first two convention centers in the world to receive a Green Globe benchmark accreditation for its environmental programs.

This award is part of wider efforts towards enhancing sustainable tourism in the world. In Australia, Sustainable Tourism CRC and its commercial arm EC3 Global have been invited to provide strategies to address the effects of climate change on the country’s tourism industry. The Tourism Industry Action Plan on Climate Change report opens much needed dialogue across industry as to the challenges faced by tourism stakeholders and presents a plan to combat the potentially devastating effect climate change could deliver to Australia’s third largest industry. The report asserts that benchmarking, sustainable best practice, carbon neutrality, and aggregate destination carbon footprints must become a part of tourism industry practice.

As the world leader in sustainable tourism technology, EC3 Global’s proven role in these areas is vital. The use of current EC3 Global technology to develop a new carbon offset scheme and a way to measure and track destinations have been recommended by the Sustainable Tourism CRC report. These existing services, particularly in benchmarking carbon footprints, is meant to assist tourism organizations actively assess their current environmental performance and to help decrease their environmental impact in the future.

It is envisioned that Australia’s AUD 20.5 billion per annum industry can significantly reduce its carbon emissions by adopting EC3 Global’s scientifically accredited services and in the process help to maintain Australia’s attractiveness as an inbound and domestic tourism destination.

Source: Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre at www.scec.com.au