Our ideas for being more environmentally friendly range from making changes before and during our meetings and events, to travel and communications.
At our Open Forums, Congresses and other in-person events, we now request that conference venues use glass reusable water bottles for the tables. For our 2024 open Forum in Madrid, for example, we shared our sustainable philosophy with the hotels we were considering, to make sure that they shared our vision.
We have been steadily removing plastic from our badges too, and encourage delegates to return their lanyards at the end of events, so that we can keep them from year to year and reuse them.
Any FICPI gifts we choose for our events must now be sustainable and chosen carefully for longevity of use. We ensure that gifts for delegates are presented in recyclable bags, and gifts will be items suitable for daily use, such as a reusable travel mug, or a water bottle created from materials sensitive to the environment.
The frequency of our travel and necessity to travel continues to be a topic for our ExCo and Bureau meetings. Any travel expenses must be weighed very carefully, and if a meeting must be in-person rather than online, there must be important reasons for this. The changes we have made in this regard extend to official meetings with bodies such as IP Offices, as well as to our international ExCo meetings, and have already produced considerable savings for the environment and for FICPI.
Copying and printing documents has also been drastically reduced. We no longer produce the weighty paper conference handbooks of previous times, instead we now use an app called Eventmobi, which also has the benefit of facilitating pre- and post-conference communication between delegates and speakers. Photocopying and printing materials from our FICPI hub at events has also been halved, with delegates and speakers encouraged to share documents online rather than relying on print-outs.
During our meetings the use of paper is reduced to practically zero. Instead, all our documents are made available through the FICPI website. Our document storage system was another important project that I was involved in, that segues into our green initiative.
As part of the wider communications and website project headed up by Julian Crump and Doug Deeth, we made sure that the FICPI website content could be set to access for a variety of security levels, from public access to ExCo attendees, FICPI members, and members of expert working parties, further reducing the need for paper copies or postage costs.
The FICPI Green Initiative was also the driving force behind the survey we carried out this year into IP firms and their sustainability efforts and goals, and which tied neatly into the topic of this year’s World IP Day on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Sustainability is top of mind for me as FICPI’s Sustainability Champion, and for me personally, in every activity I do - from attending meetings organised by other people, to organising FICPI meetings such as the 2024 Open Forum.
Next steps
If you or your firm have ideas or initiatives you’d like to share, do get in touch with me, I am keen to hear them [email protected]