Sustainability at LCIC 2024
Sustainability is not only going to be discussed in detail during LCIC 2024, we also try our best to reduce sustainability impacts as much as possible. Below we outline a number of things we do to ensure that LCIC 2024 is a truly sustainable conference.
Venue
The Life Cycle Innovation Conference 2024 is taking place place right in the heart of Berlin’s trendy Prenzlauer Berg district. LCIC 2024 is hosted at the GLS Language School on the GLS Campus Berlin, which is focussing on offering Green Meetings through various activities as highlighted in the sustainability report. The venue operates entirely with renewable energy, operates their own combined heat and power plant and LED lights throughout the premises and offers a great place to come together, collaborate, innovate and co-create! The GLS Campus was established in a historic building complex, which was created in 1898 as a public baths plus a community school. The public baths (Stadtbad Oderberger) was closed in 1986, the community school in 2004. GLS acquired, restored and renovated the buildings in 2005. In 2023, GLS was awarded the IH Seal for Environmental Sustainability.
Food
During LCIC 2024 only vegetarian and vegan food options will served. Food will be provided by a local catering service which provides regional, organic and bio food in line with seasonal considerations. Food is calculated based on a pre-conference survey and thus tailored to the number of participants per day.
Conference Material & Technical Equipement
All conference material is made available online and via a conference app to the conference participants to decrease paper waste. Only two role-up banners will printed with the logo of the conference and its sponsors, no major banner or other unnecessary promotional conference material will printed. Felt-based lanyards will be re-used as much as possible (originally purchased for LCIC 2018) for the conference badges and badges were printed on paper in order to avoid the usage of plastic casings or lanyards. Lanyards will collected at the end of the conference in order to be reused. Technical equipment will be either used from previous conferences or rented from the conference venue or local suppliers.
Conference Emissions
Emissions that will be caused by organizing the event will be fully compensated like in 2022. Emissions will be calculated based on a survey among physical conference participants and data provided by the venue. An additional two tons will be compensated to account for any emissions that might be overlooked. Emissions will be compensated through selected projects available through goldstandard.org.
Results
Emissions were calculated based on the information provided by conference participants in the travel survey. The calculation was done with the calculator provide by the German EPA and compensated with Gold Standard. The calculation document is available for download here. In total, 34.397,22 CO2e (kg) was calculated and we compensated 40 tons of CO2e to account for any possible inaccuracies in our survey data.
