Have you ever attended an event and thought to yourself, “What’s the carbon footprint of this event”? The Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) was thinking exactly that this year, which is why they decided to calculate the footprint of the upcoming Exchange Conference of 2016. This was important exercise simply because it had never been officially measured before and in seeking global change, they decided to take action and measure the footprint. A huge positive of measuring that, is that going ahead, Performance Indicators will allow lowering that footprint each year. The footprint ideally would be smaller each year and seeing what EWB believes, offsetting the footprint and carbon neutrality will come into play in the coming years.

In working with EWB estimating the footprint, the first thing we needed to figure out were particulars like how many people are attending the conference, and how many resources like food and water would be involved in that. The next part of that was to estimate the energy load of the venue over the length of the conference, and take into account wastage and unforeseen circumstances, adding an extra 10% to the final statistics. We brought all of this together to create a final estimate, and after detailed analysis on what was important to be included and what was not, we came with the final footprint estimation. These figures gave us insights into how the conference and other conference events can be more sustainable in coming years, through continually reducing the footprint annually.

A conference can be intense on energy in any given venue. EWB wanted to calculate the footprint, in order to constantly reduce it in coming years

Marcus Hinds