Saturday, March 23, 2024

Green-Land

By Annika Hipple

Kermit the Frog famously sang, “It’s not easy being green,” on The Muppet Show. But Kermit clearly wasn’t from Portland, Ore., where it actually is easy being green. The city offers a unique array of venues, suppliers and programs to help make any meeting or event both high in quality and low in environmental impact.

Green Living
“People here just live, work and play green. By coming here, you’re participating in our lifestyle,” says Laura Guimond, sustainability communications and public relations manager at Travel Portland, the city’s convention and visitors bureau.

Nancy Zavada, principal of the pioneering sustainable events firm MeetGreen, points out that the same elements that make Portland a sustainable place to live, also make it an ideal destination for green meetings. For one thing, not only is the city extremely walkable, but it also has an excellent public transportation network. The MAX light rail connects Portland International Airport to downtown, the Lloyd Center shopping and dining district and the Oregon Convention Center, eliminating the need for rental cars or event shuttles.

Portland also has the waste-management infrastructure to support sustainable meeting operations. The city has banned plastic bags and Styrofoam, and with extensive composting and recycling programs in place, there’s no need to spend time and money setting up such efforts for specific events.

This sustainability oriented mindset reflects Portland’s beautiful surroundings and emphasis on outdoor recreation. “It’s just basically the whole direction of the city,” says Katja Asaro, managing director of sales at Henry V Events, a green-minded, event production and marketing company that operates out of a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified building. “We’re heavy in the outdoor and apparel industries, and the reason they exist is because we have the great outdoors. It’s in their interest to preserve that, so there are a lot of corporate dollars to fund those types of initiatives. It’s kind of the business culture and the mantra of the city government.”

Guimond adds, “Back in the ’60s and ’70s there was a group of visionary citizens, some of whom happened to be city and regional government folks and community activists. They put together this idea of the urban growth boundary, and that’s really kept the city close to our farms, our vineyards and our natural places. And the mentality of wanting to protect that has only continued to grow.”

Portland has the nation’s largest urban forested wilderness area, Forest Park, within city limits, and is relatively close to the Cascade Mountains, Pacific coast and Columbia River Gorge. As a result, meeting attendees have access to a huge range of pre- and post-meeting activities, from sightseeing tours and wine tasting to hiking, biking, skiing and parasailing.

Green Venues
Another key element that makes Portland such a prime destination for green meetings is the availability of sustainable venues for events of any size. In 2004, the Oregon Convention Center (OCC), the largest venue of its kind in the state, became the first convention center in the United States to obtain certification under the LEED Existing Building program (it was upgraded to the LEED Silver certification four years later). “The LEED process has really helped the convention center to prioritize moving forward on a lot of energy processes,” says Erin Rowland, OCC’s sustainability coordinator. “It provided a road map-if we want to make improvements, here are the next steps. We want to continue to improve our practices so we can continue to be on the cutting edge of sustainability.”

The OCC offsets most of its electricity use, as well as all of its gas emissions, and has a rain garden to cleanse rainwater and provide other environmental services. In addition to composting and recycling much of its waste from operations and events, the OCC donates leftover food in suitable condition to local soup kitchens and shelters. Additional reusable materials are donated to a variety of other community organizations. Next, Rowland says, a key priority is searching for ways to partner with event planners to create zerowaste events. As of yet, the OCC has only had a few events in the 80th percentile, but no 100 percent zero-waste events.

In addition to the OCC, Portland has many other venues with third-party green certification, including Ecotrust’s Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, the first restored historic building in the country to earn LEED Gold certification, and the Gerding Theater at the Armory, the first LEED Platinum performing arts facility on the West Coast. There are currently 17 hotels in and around Portland with green certification, including the DoubleTree by Hilton Portland, the first hotel in Oregon to receive Green Seal certification, and the Courtyard by Marriott Portland City Center, the first LEED Gold certified hotel in the Pacific Northwest. Travel Portland maintains a Green Guide on its website for meeting planners looking for sustainable venues, lodging and suppliers.

“Portland was one of the first places for it to catch on that events and venues could have a very light environmental footprint and still be excellent venues and operate profitably,” says Dwayne Thomas, owner of Greenlight Creative, a sustainability-minded event lighting company.

At the DoubleTree, sustainability has been a focus for the past decade, inspired by both growing customer demand and a desire to gain a competitive advantage. “We started out as amateurs and rolled up our sleeves and looked up the dictionary definition of sustainability because none of us knew anything about it,” says Steve Faulstick, the DoubleTree’s general manager. “We started reaching out to the community, and as we started exploring, it was definitely a huge snowball.” The hotel diverts more than two-thirds of its waste from landfills through recycling and composting, and has significantly reduced its environmental footprint through improved energy and water efficiency and carbon offsets.

“We’ve never stayed anyplace else that comes close to doing what the DoubleTree does,” says Janiece Sneegas, director of general assembly and conference services for the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), which held its General Assembly in Portland in 2007 and will return again in 2015. “That’s a huge benefit of being in the Portland area: seeing that you can really provide great service and be a sustainable property.”

The UUA chose Portland for its events specifically because of the way the city’s mindset aligns with one of the basic principles of Unitarian Universalism: “respect for the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part.”

Green Dining
On the dining side, Portland’s convenient access to rural areas has also given rise to a food culture based on fresh, locally produced ingredients, making it easy to dine both well and sustainably. The DoubleTree purchases 65 percent of its food products on a seasonal basis from within a 500-mile radius, and the city boasts an abundance of restaurants with local, sustainable, farm-to-table programs.

“We’ve got such a great food environment from the access to the natural bounty of Oregon,” says Faulstick. “Not only do you get to support local farmers and producers and community, but the product is spectacular. Along with our beer and wine scene, that makes it kind of the sexy part of sustainability.”

This emphasis on locally grown, minimally processed, seasonal ingredients is also a key feature of Portland’s leading sustainable caterers, which include Artemis Foods, Crave Catering, Elephants Delicatessen and Vibrant Table Catering & Events. These caterers maintain a host of other green practices designed to maximize energy efficiency and minimize excess water use and waste generation. Along with reusing, recycling and composting extensively, they typically donate leftover food to local relief organizations.

Green Vendors
“If you have great venues and great caterers, that’s three-quarters of it,” says Thomas, referring to the elements of a sustainable meeting. “For those of us doing lights, sound and décor, it’s pretty consistent across the board. For the décor rental places, ‘reuse, reuse, reuse’ is their core. They’re repurposing as much as possible.”

According to Thomas, Greenlight Creative uses nothing but low-energy lighting sources such as LED and high-efficiency halogen and operates a nearly paperless business from a LEED certified building, minimizing energy use and waste as much as possible. “If there’s an option to get the same output from low energy, we do, even if the costs are higher,” says Thomas. The company also recycles “like fiends,” runs a virtually paperless office, and uses biodiesel trucks to transport equipment.

“Sometimes I feel like we go to a city and when we start talking about sustainability, it’s like we’re speaking a foreign language,” says the UUA’s Sneegas. “In Portland, everyone knows what you’re talking about. You don’t have to start at the beginning. It’s not the same Groundhog Day effect that we sometimes feel going to cities where sustainability is not so much on the radar.”

Asaro adds that Portland is often a case study for other destinations that are “trying to mirror what Portland is doing. They come here to learn and try to create an event around how green and sustainable it is.”

Portland is a community-oriented city, an attitude fueled by the local food culture and the ease of access to neighborhoods, nature and recreation. This presents countless opportunities for event planners who want to incorporate team-building or volunteer components into their programs. Options include everything from maintaining local trails or building bicycles for children, to participating in philanthropic games and adventure activities.

“All of the infrastructure is there if you just want to go to the destination and have it already in place, but there are also a lot of opportunities if you want to take it a step further,” Asaro says. “There are lots of organizations here that can help guide you in that direction if that’s what you want to do.”

Sneegas sums things up: “Your expectations change when you’re in Portland about what’s green and what’s possible compared to the rest of the world.”

It’s enough to make even Kermit change his mind. Perhaps he was thinking of Portland when he finished his song with, “I am green, and it’ll do fine. It’s beautiful, and I think it’s what I want to be.”

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