Phuket conference venues, hotels and other businesses are increasingly thinking green as the emphasis shifts towards protecting the island’s natural beauty. One of the most effective ways of making your event more green is to reduce the use of single-use plastic, ideally to zero. Here are a few ways you can achieve that.

Pick the right Phuket conference venue

It’s the obvious but most important place to start. The venue you choose will have a huge impact on how much single-use plastic your event inevitable expends. You want to find a place that provides water in glass bottles, doesn’t give out single-use straws and uses metal cutlery instead of plastic in their catering.

Think about how you cater

Providing food and drinks to your event attendees is obviously essential, but there are ways you can minimise the amount of single-use plastic waste this creates. Instead of giving out individual water bottles, have a few water stations with large water-cooler machines. You can also fill some glass or reusable plastic jugs with water and spread them around the venue to make sure there’s no long queues at the stations. You can provide biodegradable cups and plates or encourage people to bring their own cups.

Ban wasteful goodie bags

Exhibitors like to hand out goodie bags at Phuket conference venues, but these often end up containing worthless plastic tat that immediately gets discarded. Putting a ban on this does add some work for you as the organiser – having to check each exhibitor’s bags to make sure they’re abiding by the rules – but it will significantly reduce the amount of waste your event creates.

Go old-school with badges

Delegate badges, lanyards and passes inevitably create a lot of waste plastic, but it’s hard to do away with them completely. They’re pretty much essential. However, there are ways you can make sure that they are less harmful to the environment. Replace plastic badges with stickers, alligator clip lanyards with business card sized badges and avoid using lamination wherever possible. On the whole, avoid overprinting to minimise wastage (which also minimises cost, incidentally).

Check your suppliers

In everything from catering to equipment to decorations, there are suppliers out there who have chosen to be environmentally conscious in their business practises and minimise their use of single-use plastics. While their fees might be fractionally higher, it’s worth the extra cost for the kudos your event will receive for making the effort to be environmentally friendly, not to mention the benefit to the environment itself.