EG takes the industry’s responsibility to our planet and its people very seriously. You see that in these pages every week and in the events that we showcase.
We encourage the industry to play its part in helping reduce carbon emissions, in being more inclusive, in being a better sector, not just doing the best deals. We poke you, we celebrate you and sometimes we tell you that you need to do better.
But equally important to us at EG is being part of the solution too. We want to show that we care as much as you do about doing the right thing and about taking action.
So, at this year’s EG Awards we started taking our first steps on the journey to delivering you a carbon-neutral event. With the help of specialist consultant Agora, the team at EG have monitored and measured our carbon footprint and introduced a range of measures to minimise our impact.
For the second year in a row, the awards dinner was vegetarian by default, a move that saved some 6,500 kgCO2e – the equivalent of 2.5 trips around the world by plane. Even the meat option (chicken), for those in the room who chose it, was selected because it had the smallest carbon footprint of all the meats.
Our welcome fizz was English sparkling wine, as part of our focus on local produce – not only to save on carbon-emitting air miles, but to support British business too.
We moved most of our paper products to digital, with any paper we did use being 100% recycled, utilised LED lighting and reused as many products as we could.
Winners also took home a more environmentally sound award this year as we shifted from metal and plastic to a chic (and really rather lovely) wooden trophy – a move that saved emissions equivalent to those used in heating eight homes for a month.
These actions, and so many more, have enabled us to benchmark the carbon footprint of the EG Awards at 12.6 tonnes of CO2e. That is still clearly a long way off being carbon-neutral, but it is a place to start and a number to guide us as we – like the industry – move ahead on our pathway to net zero.
And thanks to the 700-plus of you who attended the event, we have been able to offset the carbon we were unable to eliminate through a Gold Standard charity based in Guatemala.
The Healthy Homes project is working with families in Guatemala to help replace smoke-based stoves, which pose a dangerous risk to people’s health, with more efficient cookstoves. A simple measure that has a positive impacts not only on the health of the community but on the planet too.
We will be taking lessons learnt from the ceremony to continually improve our footprint – at the EG Awards 2023 and across all of our events.
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