31 sustainability excuses and what to say back.

Expensive compared to what? Once you count purchasing, transport and disposal together, reuse and rental often come out better value, and the lower-carbon option frequently costs the same or less. Hiring instead of buying, lighter loads and less waste all reduce spend. The TRACE materials data shows 1,229 tonnes of material used once and thrown away, at around £292 a tonne just to dispose of, before you count what it cost to buy and transport.

Most of this is the same decisions made differently. Time is the universal blocker, but a lot of sustainable practice is a choice you already make: hiring instead of buying, a plant-forward menu, a lower-carbon supplier. None of those adds a task. Where measurement helps is prioritising, showing which of those choices is worth making first.

Not knowing where to start is the normal place to begin. The knowledge builds by doing: choose one area, get it slightly wrong, improve next time. Beginning badly still beats waiting until you feel ready, and you learn faster once you start than you ever will preparing to. Measuring as you go turns each event into a lesson for the next.

A budget isn't the gate it seems, because money is often already being lost. Cheap single-use materials, over-ordering and waste all cost you twice, to buy and to bin. Many lower-impact choices spend less: less material to transport and dispose of, lower-carbon catering that's often cheaper, suppliers reused rather than re-sourced. Measurement mainly shows where that money is already leaking, so you can stop it.

You can keep choice and still cut impact. Blended recipes lower a burger's footprint by around 71% with nothing taken off the menu, describing dishes by flavour rather than 'vegan' raises how many people choose them, and digital sits alongside print for anyone who still wants paper.

Capacity is less of a blocker than it feels, because the first moves are decisions inside existing roles: what you specify, who you book, what's on the menu. They don't need new headcount. Where time is tight, measuring one area you already have data for shows where that limited capacity will do the most good.

The market has already decided it's a priority. Roughly 62% of RFPs include sustainability requirements, and many large clients now have to collect this for their own reporting. Treating it as optional risks losing work to those who didn't.

Leadership support helps, but it doesn't always appear on day one. Most successful initiatives begin with a practical opportunity, a small win or a clear business case. Sustainability conversations become easier when framed around cost, efficiency, client expectations and risk rather than environmental impact alone. Measurement then provides the evidence to demonstrate results and build wider support.

Lower-impact alternatives are already used at scale. Paper-based board has become the most common graphics material in the UK, which shows the question has moved from whether it's possible to whether we'll choose it. The remaining gap is sourcing, and isla's member-built library exists to close it.

Suppliers and venues usually hold more than people assume. Fuel, power, loads and waste are part of their normal operations; the information just isn't asked for clearly. Specific requests in contracts get better answers than broad questions about credentials. And it's worth the effort: almost the entire footprint, 97.9%, sits in the supply chain, so it can't be worked around.

What people say and what they have to do are often different. A client might shrug when you raise sustainability, then be required to report the event's emissions to their own head office or regulator. So even when they claim not to care, they usually need the data anyway, and it's easier for everyone if you already have it.

Most of what feels like extra work is a different version of a task you already do: choosing a supplier, specifying materials, planning a menu. The lower-impact choice rarely takes longer. The part that does add work, like collecting data, gets lighter when you build it into normal delivery instead of bolting it on afterwards.

Realistic alternatives already exist: incentivise rail, choose closer or better-connected venues, consolidate trips, and weigh up hybrid where the format allows. The cost picture also shifts once you count what travel adds elsewhere. Travel is usually the largest share of emissions and the least captured (only around 43% record audience travel), so measuring it is where the biggest, most defensible wins show up.

Less, not none. Cutting impact doesn't mean taking options away or asking attendees to feel deprived. Start with balance: smaller red-meat portions, blended or flavour-led dishes that cut the footprint for everyone, and the quiet win of staff catering, which skews more red-meat heavy and stays out of sight. Red meat drives 43% of catering emissions, much of it on buffet tables.

This is a commercial objection, so answer it commercially. Client expectations, procurement requirements, efficiency and competitive advantage are the lead: clients increasingly have to report the emissions of events they commission, so their suppliers get asked too, and cutting material and waste is direct margin. Measurement is what demonstrates the progress and value behind the case.

Doing it the usual way made sense when nobody was measuring. Now there are industry benchmarks by event type and size, and they show how business-as-usual compares to peers. Small, repeatable changes folded into existing process move the number.

Small improvements repeated across every event, and across the whole supply chain, add up to real change. That's isla's own finding: a marginal reduction in one event becomes significant once it's standard across a portfolio, which is exactly what a run of events is. So the size of any single event isn't the point. Pick one change, make it every time, and it compounds.

Tick-box sustainability is the thing credible measurement replaces. A company-level accreditation doesn't tell you what a specific event produced, so it can't guide decisions or stand up to scrutiny. Activity-based numbers turn a claim into something you can defend and act on with confidence.

Complexity comes from trying to fix everything together. Picking one decision to change, a material, a supplier, a menu, and one area to measure keeps it manageable, and each step makes the next clearer. That's how the teams who look advanced got there.

A credible claim needs evidence. The test is whether it rests on traceable activity data, litres, kWh, kilograms, measured the same way each time so progress can be compared honestly. Regulation now backs this up, with the Green Claims Directive penalising unsupported claims by up to 10% of turnover, but the principle stands on its own: show the proof.

Branded items earn their place when each one is genuinely useful and has somewhere to go afterwards. The ones that aren't are waste by Monday (events average around 2.14kg of waste per attendee). Digital and reusable formats keep the brand visible, and confirming a destination before you order does most of the rest.

Framing it as ideology misses where it bites: budgets, risk and resilience. Rising input costs are increasingly driven by ecological pressure, regulation is tightening, and clients are asking. Treated as cost and business performance, it lands better with sceptics, and it's more accurate.

Sustainability involves several teams, but every decision still needs a clear owner. 'Someone else's job' is what happens when no one is named. Assign who owns each call, the material spec, the supplier choice, the menu, the venue's flooring, and it moves. Shared awareness is useful; clear accountability is what actually changes the footprint.

Existing schemes are a fair start, and the way to build on them is to check what they actually changed. Measuring against your own past events shows whether the investment moved anything, which protects it from being written off as a gesture.

You don't need universal agreement on every definition before taking action. Widely recognised frameworks already provide a common language for understanding and measuring impact, and most organisations are dealing with similar challenges. The goal isn't to find the perfect definition of sustainability, but to make informed decisions and improve over time using a consistent approach.

Carpet earns its place on acoustics, accessibility and finish, so the answer is a better version of the same outcome. It's the highest-emitting build material in the dataset and 78% is used once. Reusable temporary flooring meets those needs without the single-use waste, and it works best when the venue owns and reuses the stock.

The effort is lower than it looks because the inputs already exist in delivery: fuel, power, transport, materials. Capturing what's already there as you go beats rebuilding it after the event, and you don't have to measure everything at once. One reliable area is a real start.

Standing still carries the larger exposure. Without measurement you can't answer client questions or meet incoming regulations. Lost pitches and exclusion from client frameworks add to it. The first measured step is the lower-risk move.

Credible measurement guides where effort goes. Without it, teams spread thin and guess; with it, the big sources stand out, usually materials, catering and travel, so changes land where they count. It earns its keep by making the action that follows effective, and it gives you confidence to take action.

Measurement often reveals where spend, carbon and operational risk are concentrated. It helps identify waste, inefficiencies and areas where resources are being used once and discarded. Single-use materials alone carry an estimated £500k disposal bill on top of their purchase cost. By showing where these costs sit, measurement helps organisations prioritise actions that reduce both impact and expenditure.

With 97.9% of emissions in the supply chain, it's the part most worth the effort, and more doable than it feels. Suppliers already hold the data, and small ones can report Scope 1 and 2 from their utility bills. isla's five steps lay out the route: start early, allow lead time, set clear expectations, put it in contracts, tailor the ask to supplier size.