Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Technology is Your Friend, Part Two

This week I am here at EclipseCon 2008 producing a conference for 1,400 open source technology programmers. Last post I talked about Bjorn, EclipseCon and how technology and green meetings go hand in hand. Today, I want to share the additional green practices EclipseCon embraces.

EclipseCon’s commitment to their conference community is to:
Choose greener cities and venues
Give you a greener place to rest your head
Feed you a healthy, tasty, sustainable menu
Reduce, reuse and recycle while we re-think how we meet

For a full listing and really cool chart of their annual benchmarks, see http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/index.php?page=environmental/

Participants are appreciative! One of last year’s evaluations read, “Thanks for making recycling available during the conference. I recycle at home and want to recycle on the road too.”

It is also the right thing to do economically. We printed EclipseCon 22x28 session signs (without the year) four years ago at a total cost of $10,345. We have reused them each year only replacing a few damaged ones. Total savings over the past three years $36,907.

By serving water in large water stations instead of individual bottled water, the cost savings was $10,800 off the bottom line. Now that’s a great way to make a Conference Chair happy!

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