The environmentally-conscious Adelaide Convention Centre is endeavouring to reduce waste from exhibitions going into landfill and increase recycling and reusing of these materials.
The Centre is encouraging their clients, exhibitors and contractors to appropriately separate materials on-site into key colour coded recycling streams including cardboard, paper, and plastics. No waste from the exhibitions will go directly to landfill and it is hoped a resource recovery of greater than 90% from the new waste and recycling systems can be achieved. The small remaining waste stream will then be further processed at an offsite facility to maximise resource recovery.
To measure and report the performance of the new recycling systems, the Adelaide Convention Centre has worked with Zero Waste SA and Rawtec to develop a specially designed waste and recycling reporting template. This template is designed to align reporting against the Waste Hierarchy (Refer Figure 1), which guides best practice in waste management. The Centre will pilot the new reporting template and if successful, it may be extended for use to other state government agencies.
“As a leading international convention centre committed to sustainable initiatives, we are pleased to be pioneering this initiative with Zero Waste SA to reduce and ultimately eliminate waste from our exhibitions destined for landfill. We hope that with support from Zero Waste SA and Rawtec, we will boost education about landfill and we will set a new benchmark for waste management across the state,” Adelaide Convention Centre Chief Executive, Alec Gilbert, said.
The program debuted at the Adelaide Convention Centre’s own event, the Cellar Door Wine Festival, 25-27 February. Thousands of visitors converged on the centre over the three day festival to enjoy the wine and food of regional South Australia in the first ever state wine festival. Designated recycle stations directed visitors to appropriately discard their food, plates and cutlery, which were all collected and fed to the Adelaide Convention Centre’s worm farm. Melted water from ice in wine buckets was pumped into the venue’s gardens.
The Adelaide Convention Centre aims to be the most environmentally responsible convention centre in Australia and is committed to Gold Service, Green Attitude. The centre provides all event convenors with the opportunity to calculate their event carbon footprint and offset the emissions through their partnership with Trees for Life.