As vice president and deputy general counsel at event management giant Maritz for the past seven years, Jill Blood has had a front-row seat on industry contracting trends. And one trend that has caught her attention is what she calls, “sustainability with teeth.”
Historically, she says, sustainability efforts have been focused on on-site activations, such as cutting down on swag or providing reusable water bottles. However, organizations are now more focused on measurable, meaningful reductions, tracked year over year, and they’re building those into the contract.
“What we've been seeing are RFPs, both for us and for vendors, asking about sustainability efforts, wanting assistance with measuring the carbon footprints of events, and wanting plans for improvements year over year,” said Blood on a November 21 MeetingsNet webinar, “Outsmarting Legal Uncertainty: Legal Insights for Event Pros” (now available on demand).
Blood shared a sample sustainability clause that Maritz has been seeing: “What it essentially says is that you’ll measure the event’s carbon footprint, you’ll track it, and if you don't hit certain metrics, you'll pay a fine.” At present, those fines are “pretty small,” she says. However, “we suspect that over time there's going to be a lot more emphasis on tracking and reporting, and those penalties are going to go up.”
Blood encouraged the audience to be thoughtful about what they’re asking of suppliers in terms of sustainability. She recounted a story of a group that wanted to restrict a certain type of oil that wasn't ethically sourced. However, it wasn’t practical to avoid it because it was in hotels’ lotions, shampoo, soaps, and other products. “To make sure every type of oil [used at a property] is sustainably sourced would have been thousands of hours of work or maybe just impossible,” she said.
Blood has also seen cases where procurement has asked for unrealistic sustainability goals. For example, she cited the example of a corporation that wanted a 50 percent year-over-year reduction in an event’s carbon footprint written into the contract. However, the organizer balked at hosting the event in a new location or making other meaningful changes that would help to read the goal.
Sustainability contract provisions, she says, will be a challenge until the industry establishes better standards, measurement tools, and tracking systems.
Other topics covered in Blood’s 60-minute, interactive legal webinar included using artificial intelligence in the planning process, the effects of social and political issues on contracts, and data privacy and security.
