GreenBlue staff recently returned from our 2014 SPC Spring Conference. Having Seattle as our host city set the stage for one of our most successful conferences to-date. With its progressive sustainability initiatives , Seattle provided the perfect venue to allow us to develop an agenda full of tours and sessions that explored some of the most innovative sustainability projects in the country. Over 300 sustainability professionals representing all aspects of the packaging supply chain attended the Conference. The breakdown of participating organizations included brand owners, retailers, material manufacturers, converters, government organizations, nonprofits, educational institutions, and consultants.
Tag: Seattle
Growing up on the coast of southern Maine, Seattle was about the furthest point in the contiguous US that I could travel. This is probably one of the reasons I never made it out there. While the SPC Conference (#SPC2014) will not necessarily be a vacation, it is an opportunity to be in an amazing new place while pursuing my interests and learning from packaging and sustainability professionals.
Looking into the city (mostly food and must see tourist attractions) in anticipation of my post-conference stay, I got carried away with clicks and found myself looking at Seattle’s Sustainability Initiatives.
At GreenBlue, we all do our best to “walk the sustainability walk” in our daily lives at home and at the office. In the past we have even had intra-staff challenges that involved sustainability actions like bringing our own containers to coffee shops and lunch spots for take-out food, eating more fruits and vegetables, collecting compostable waste in the office, and spending more time outside on a daily basis.
We spend our professional lives thinking about sustainability, but that doesn’t stop when we walk out our office door. We do our best to host sustainable conferences, too. What does that mean? First, we look for hotels that offer their own suite of sustainable practices, such as not laundering sheets and towels daily unless requested. We prefer to locate our meetings in a city center that is available by public transportation and allows attendees to walk to restaurants, shops, and sites. Our instructions to the hotel’s catering staff might also be seen as a bit strict sometimes: we require that water is served in pitchers or coolers with reusable glassware, cream and sugar are served in bowls instead of individual packets, coffee and tea are provided in ceramic cups with spoons instead of disposable cups and stirrers, sustainable seafood choices and local products are specified wherever possible…and the list goes on.
SPC’s Spring Conference agenda is teeming with thought provoking panels and outstanding presenters, and it is an event for everyone. In classic fashion, here is my top 5 list and playbook for anyone planning to attend or thinking of attending:
- Take a tour – they are perfect small group networking opportunities. You may also learn a thing or two (learning may not apply to the pub crawl).
- Let the emails pile up – the flash talk format is going to bring the heat. Put off the latest calendar invite and carry the conversations into the networking breaks.
- Find out the relationship between Garbage Burritos, Mariachi Bands, and recycling rates with Sego Jackson.
- Wake up early and go to bed late – from early morning yoga sessions to dinner and dialogue groups, there is never a dull moment at an SPC conference. Make the most of the time we have together in Seattle.
- Take advantage of the amazing resources and opportunities made possible by our sponsors, Starbucks, Microsoft, REI, PepsiCo, HAVI Global Solutions, General Mills, and Dow Chemical Company, and amplified by our Seattle location.
Resource recovery and revalorization seems to be just about the hottest topic in the packaging sustainability community these days. It’s hard to pick up any packaging publication – print or online – without some reference to the need to expand packaging recyclability, and the opportunities and challenges involved. GreenBlue’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition made sure to emphasize this important topic as we developed the agenda for our 2014 Spring Conference, with tours and sessions that highlight the newest developments in resource recovery and end of life management.
The Pacific Northwest region leads the country in recycling and composting. We recently talked with Conference speaker, Dick Lilly, Manager for Waste Prevention and Product Stewardship at Seattle Public Utilities, about Seattle’s cutting edge sustainability efforts, specifically its composting and recycling efforts. Seattle is the first U.S. city to require that all single-use food service packaging be either compostable or recyclable, helping the city move toward its goal of a zero waste future. Lilly explained that in this shift to using all compostable or recyclable packaging, the city holds meetings with restaurants and manufacturers regularly to discuss what does and doesn’t work, and what needs to happen to make these regulations more successful. “One things that I would applaud about the restaurant industry is that they have been tremendously innovative and have made a great effort to come up with new products. The industry has changed dramatically in terms of the products made today that will help restaurants move in the direction of more compostables or reusables and less disposables,” said Lilly.
