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Sustainable event planning in our locations: IMPACT FESTIVAL 2024

17 Dec 2024

The IMPACT FESTIVAL is Europe's largest B2B event for sustainable innovations and took place from 30-31 October - this year for the first time in the Messe Frankfurt Forum. In this interview Rick Neu, Event Manager Sustainability at the Impact Festival, gives us an insight into the sustainable planning of the event.

Besucher der Impact Festival im Forum der Messe Frankfurt
Impact Festival, Exhibition in Hall Areal

Why is the Forum Messe Frankfurt the ideal venue for the Impact Festival 2024?

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Rick Neu: "The Messe Frankfurt Forum offers a modern and light-flooded location that is centrally located 'in the heart of Frankfurt'. The professional and wide range of services - from wayfinding to personnel services - convinced us. The two large halls, which can even be divided on the upper floor, and the numerous adjoining rooms are perfect for our diverse supporting programs such as masterclasses, deep dives and more.

Sustainability is particularly important to us. Frankfurt's convenient location and excellent public transport connections make it easier to travel to the event in an environmentally friendly way. We have been in close contact with Messe Frankfurt's sustainability management, which takes sustainability seriously, right from the planning phase. This is also reflected in the EMAS certification.

 

And last but not least, I would like to emphasize the great, professional support provided by the project management team at Messe Frankfurt. The collaboration was extremely pleasant and very fun!"

In a nutshell: Can you give us five operational sustainability measures that you successfully implemented at this event?

Ein Mann und eine Frau sprechen miteinander

Rick Neu: "For us, sustainability is not a list of individual measures, but an integral part of all our decisions and activities. It is therefore difficult for us to select just five measures. Nevertheless, I would like to mention a few as examples:

  1. Impact Mission: We were able to promote sustainable behavior with a specially developed gamification tool. Digital tasks - such as visiting certain rooms or returning lanyards - automatically triggered donations to social institutions. For example, a visit to the Impact Art Ocean Room resulted in a donation to Ozeankind e.V.
  2. Material selection: From particularly sustainable lanyards to not using give-aways and flyers - we attach great importance to resource-saving materials.
  3. Regional service providers: By working with local partners, we were able to minimize transport routes.
  4. Diversity & inclusion: Diversity was a major concern for us when casting our stage programs. There were also gender-neutral toilets.
  5. Vegan Catering: Our catering was purely vegan - both for our guests and for the crew - and there was free drinking water.

In addition, we are using TRASHGALORE and 2bdifferent to calculate the carbon footprint of the event (ECF) and are consistently focusing on the topic of sustainability in the supporting program, for example through the SDG area or the “Impact Women” exhibition."

Your focus is on a specifically sustainable event orientation. How did you find working with the Messe Frankfurt team in this respect?

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Rick Neu: "The cooperation with the Messe Frankfurt team was consistently positive and a great pleasure for us. Every request was handled and implemented in the best possible way. In particular, the regular exchange with our technical contact as well as project management and sustainability management was invaluable to us."

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