We have now moved all our electricity supplies from the Megalith that is EDF albeit on a green tariff (Carbon levy exempt) to Ecotricity. The logic is twofold. Firstly we prefer dealing with smaller companies, EDF professes to have somewhere over 100 000 employees, there is just no human face; it is all about systems and processes. Second, EDF produces both clean and dirty electricity, we prefer to buy from a company who are 100% focused on clean electricity, not an organisation with a foot in both camps.

We have moved our food waste recycling from Paper Round another ancient megalith with the customer service to match. To a much smaller organisation with a composting facility 20miles away from us, as opposed to the 100+ miles round trip the disaster calling itself paper round used. The savings in CO2 emissions are clearly fantastic.

At least 10 standardised ways of measuring the sustainability of a conference event or meeting, could things be more chaotic.

With ISO 20121 being mooted as the new international standard for sustainable events, sitting atop of the domestic standard of ISO 14001, then we have BSI 8901 as a further refinement. Sitting beneath these are a whole host of individual UK government supported measures, Green Tourism Scheme, Green Mark, Hospitality climates etc. Then yet further down the rung you have a series of single issue government schemes run by the various agencies i.e. Envirowise, Carbon Trust, WRAP etc etc.

The cost in terms of time to administer all of this is at tenable for even the largest organisations (I guess that why not one of them has bothered to sign up to them all) The cost to the government to administer this edifice must be staggering.

That’s why so many venues have resorted to their devices. Leading the pack is Cavendish Conference Venues London’s leading supplier of conference and meeting rooms. Who recently announced that they have achieved landfill neutral status, something which has been verified by their recent victory in winning the Visit London 2009/2010.