Sustainable Events Conference (SECON)
From To-Dos to How-To-Dos
Photo: GCB/EVVC, Philip Gunkel
Photo: GCB/EVVC, Philip Gunkel
Sustainability and digitalisation: two megatrends that often still seem like strangers to each other. SECON 2025 wants to show how they can become a joint success story - with smart solutions, tangible best practices and a portion of future spirit.
"You have to endure the fact that change doesn't happen immediately," says Jan Quaing, research associate at the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) in the sustainable.digital. project, at the literature café for the opening session of the Sustainable Events Conference 2025. The co-author of the book "Doppelte Transformation gestalten: A Practical Guide to Sustainability and Digitalisation" discusses with fellow author Dr Holger Feist and moderator Katie Gallus how the merging of sustainability and digitalisation is opening up new horizons for society and business - and how both areas can benefit from each other and shape the future together.
So far, these two central social, economic and political challenges have rarely been considered in their interaction, explains Feist, drawing a comparison with villages facing each other at the foot of a mountain. In order to overcome the logistical problem of a mountain tour, it is important to find a common language: in the form of reliable figures, big data, which can be mastered with the help of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. Although (still) very energy-intensive, AI in particular is indispensable for tackling the mammoth task of climate change, reducing emissions in the long term and making key sectors such as energy, agriculture and mobility more sustainable and efficient.
Photo: tw tagungswirtschaft
To "transform the venue's energy supply", host Michael Stober invites SECON participants on an excursion around the grounds of the Stober estate. Nestled in extensive parkland on Lake Groß Behnitz, just a few kilometres from Berlin, Stober acquired the estate in 2000 and has since invested over 31 million euros in renovations, refurbishments, conversions, extensions and infrastructure. Today, the estate offers over 30 individually designed conference rooms - from compact lounges to spacious halls with a capacity of up to 750 people indoors and up to 4,000 people outdoors. The adjoining Bio-Hotel comprises around 300 rooms, furnished with natural materials such as COCO-MAT beds and using rainwater for the sanitary facilities. According to Stober, the motivation for a sustainable venue is quite simple: to operate as cost-effectively as possible. By using rainwater, the hotel saves 75 per cent on water costs compared to a non-sustainable hotel. Two separate 500 kW wood chip systems cover the heating requirements for the approximately 15,000 square metres of heatable space and generate annual heating costs of 75,000 euros. Electricity for the hotel's own needs is supplied by 900 photovoltaic modules, which would have paid for themselves in just four years. Since 2013, the estate has been drawing up a carbon footprint and "offsetting" unavoidable emissions in a neighbouring 20-hectare forest area. With these and other planned measures, such as a 2 MW electricity generator, the estate owner is getting closer to his goal of being completely self-sufficient in the future, and not just in terms of his balance sheet.
The so-called Twin Transformation is the keyword and core content of SECON 2025, to which the GCB German Convention Bureau and the European Association of Event Centres (EVVC) have invited participants for 24 to 25 February. The two partners have been working towards a more sustainable event industry for over a decade with a jointly organised conference. In 2023, the "greenmeetings and events conference" became the fundamentally reorganised "Sustainable Events Conference - Shaping the Future". Around 150 participants accepted the invitation to the second edition this year at Landgut Stober in Nauen, Brandenburg. They included sustainability managers and consultants, tourism and destination managers, catering and food service experts, digitalisation and innovation specialists, scientists and representatives from industry associations such as the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association Germany (HSMA), the Association of the German Trade Fair Industry (AUMA), VPLT - The Association for Media and Event Technology and fwd: Bundesvereinigung Veranstaltungswirtschaft. In short: many of the players who want to drive sustainable development in the German-speaking event industry.
Photo: GCB, Patrick Kuschfeld
On the stage in the "Salon Conrad" above the completely renovated former cattle shed, it is clear that "nothing has been the same since the last SECON", says Matthias Schultze, Managing Director of the German Convention Bureau, in his welcoming address. Artificial intelligence has arrived with ChatGPT and, although its full potential cannot yet be estimated, has developed over the last two years from a technological innovation into an almost everyday tool for DMOs, trade fair organisers and hotels. Using such technologies to (finally) achieve sustainability goals in the industry? "We need examples, we need best practices," says Schultze.
Just do it!
Participants will receive this information in the one-and-a-half-hour parallel sessions on mobility, emissions measurement, venue energy, food & food waste guidance and smart production & waste management. Two of the five topics can be visited and discussed in depth during the course of the event. Lena Buhleier explains that sustainability and the reduction of greenhouse gases are still among the main tasks in the session on emissions measurement, which is filled to capacity. The Senior Sustainability Consultant at ClimatePartner emphasised that the fight against global warming is "no longer a moral obligation". At a time when emissions are continuing to rise, the annual costs of damage caused by climate change (around 38 trillion dollars) worldwide are six times higher than the investments needed to limit them (around 6 trillion dollars) and insurance policies and taxes for climate risks are being increased, it is much more a question of a financial obligation. If you want to avoid emissions, you first need to know how many emissions are actually generated, both in terms of the corporate carbon footprint and the event carbon footprint. However, when asked who is already involved in measuring emissions, the responses in the room remain sparse.
Twin transformation capability framework: The twin transformation process can be compared to the metamorphosis of a larva into a butterfly. The strong body holds the butterfly together so that it relies on all four wings to fly. Similarly, organisations can only "take off" to twin transformation if the relevant dynamic twin transformation capabilities have been developed and implemented in all four capability categories. Graphic: A.-S. Christmann et al: The Twin Transformation Butterfly (2024)
So far, the challenges seem too great, such as limited time and personnel resources, a lack of legal requirements, complex data collection with a lack of standardisation or the heterogeneity of the many one-off events. Corporations or equivalent companies that are subject to statutory CSR reporting requirements from this year onwards due to their balance sheet total, net sales or number of employees must go one step further. For example, the audio technology specialist D&B Group, for which Robert Trebus works as Global Director of Sustainability and who was appointed Sustainability Director at the VPLT in February. The CSRD report scope includes "more than just the footprint", reports Trebus. This would involve 1,078 data points from the various organisations in the Group, which are collected by the individual sustainability officers from all stakeholders by means of surveys and interviews. "You can no longer do that with Excel," says Trebus. As all this data has to be carefully documented in the ESRS matrix (European Sustainability Reporting Standards), digitalisation is no longer an option. His employees had to be trained for two years and the organisational model had to be integrated into an ESG cockpit. The result is a cloud-based solution in which the data owner only sees the fields for which he or she is responsible.
Lena Buhleier, Senior Sustainability Consultant at ClimatePartner, explains the three quality levels of emissions data for carbon footprinting to participants in the emissions measurement session. Photo: GCB/EVVC, Philip Gunkel
Last year, the manufacturer of sound reinforcement systems released a free tool for event organisers, venues and suppliers of all sizes. SustainSymphony is the name of the company's own "Software as a Service" solution, which is specially tailored to the data structure of the dynamic live event landscape. Users do not have to fill in any mandatory fields. It is much more important to familiarise themselves with the processes and find out who can provide data of the appropriate quality. Regardless of the size of the organisation or the individual level of experience, users can easily calculate event-related emissions for an event and make their sustainability management more efficient.
Reduction drives innovation
The speakers on sustainability in the fields of smart production and waste management also favour solutions that are as little complex as possible. One challenge in the latter is to record and measure waste streams. After all, what cannot be measured cannot be managed effectively. Marcus Stadler, environmental consultant at Stadler concept GmbH, uses the waste pyramid to explain how waste management targets such as recycling and utilisation rates or reduction can be defined and then implemented. This also shows that sustainability is first and foremost an economic issue. A prominent example from the trade fair industry: the rented carpet.
"1. you drag in, you drag out, 2. you make a mess, you clean up.".
Jörg Zeißig, CEO at Holtmann+, fwd: Board member and President of IFES - International Federation of Exhibition and Event
Stadler calculates that rental tiles are more financially worthwhile than purchasing new tiles for each use from the fourth use onwards. From the third use onwards, they would pay off in terms of the CO2 balance and immediately after the first in terms of the amount of waste. In order to be able to make sustainable decisions in such a context, precise knowledge of material compositions, their sustainability assessment, production and disposal conditions and the entire supply chain as well as the applicable (waste) legislation is required. Plastic carpets, for example, can currently only be downcycled due to dirt-prone production processes - a problem for the desired circular economy in the exhibition industry that can soon be solved, as the panel of experts assures us. In order to integrate waste management as an integral part of one's own sustainability strategy, it is not crucial to know all the answers - but to ask the right questions. "The complex topic of sustainability should not be a nuisance," emphasised Jörg Zeißig, CEO at Holtmann+, who presented the Better Stands Initiative to the participants. It aims to encourage exhibitors and the companies they commission to move away from disposable exhibition stands and instead use reusable and ultimately recyclable structures. External auditors assess the stands in ten categories and categorise them into bronze, silver and gold quality classes. Those who initially receive bronze strive for a higher level at the second attempt. According to Zeißig, this could save up to 67 per cent of waste. Sustainability Manager Xiao Zhu is delighted to be celebrating similar successes at the Hotel Berlin in Berlin. In the hotel kitchen, the Winnow System uses a camera and scales to quickly and easily record exactly how much food is thrown away and why. In this way, potential areas for reducing food waste can be quickly recognised with the help of AI. At the same time, the hotel uses "monster" posters to remind its guests to reduce plate waste, gives leftover food to food sharing centres or donates coffee grounds to a local tree nursery. "You're doing it, keep it up!" appeals Ilona Jarabek, President of the EVVC and Managing Director of Musik- und Kongresshalle Lübeck, with regard to the many other sustainable examples that both the speakers and the participants were able to report on during the in-depth discussions. And that's exactly what SECON is all about: getting started, staying on the ball, having fun with challenges and making progress together.
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