Events and Venues

Events are an important part of Tasmania’s product portfolio as they often drive travel to Tasmania.

Tasmania’s most significant and successful events tell a story that is consistent with the Tasmanian brand promise. Our high-quality niche event experiences have a competitive advantage in being linked to this nature-based message and the unique food, wine and heritage attributes of our brand.

Tasmanian events should therefore include environmental sustainability as part of this competitive advantage.

This simply means:

• Making our actions more sustainable
• Using less of everything so that it lasts longer
• Using products, suppliers and procedures that have less impact on the environment.

Some of our Tasmanian events have developed highly innovative solutions to this problem, but the first step is usually to write a green event policy. This need not be arduous but it should cover areas such as power use, water use, waste management, venue selection, catering choices, travel and freight procedures.

The following checklist provides information on what to consider when creating a green event policy and offers practical and low cost actions for any event organisers or venue managers. The checklist is a compilation of information from the Australian Conservation Foundation, Great Southern E-vents and the Department of Environment and Climate Change.

Checklist for a green event policy [PDF 45KB]

The Taste Festival

An example of innovative sustainable practises is the Taste Festival (Taste of Tasmania). The Taste has traditionally been a leader in environmental event management.

The festival uses a four-stream recycling system in recycling glass, cardboard, cooking oil and composting all food waste.

As well, it requires all stalls to use biodegradable packaging, and that marketing materials are printed on sustainable paper stock using environmentally friendly inks.

This year the festival is also complementing their carbon reduction efforts with an emissions offset program. Greenhouse gas emissions are being offset with the purchase of renewable carbon credits through Climate Friendly, an organisation whose goal is to make it easy for businesses and individuals to take immediate and meaningful action on climate change.

Carbon emission figures are calculated to include emissions produced by onsite cooking with LPG, electricity usage and waste sent to landfill.

Advertising for the festival encourages visitors to help reduce the event's carbon footprint and run a cleaner, greener event with the inclusion of the message 'Walk, cycle or carpool to the Festival and Reduce, Reuse and Recycle'

Other festival initiatives include:

• Use of polycarbonate and glass wine glasses rather than plastic throw away units
• Use of compostable crockery
• Use of compostable cutlery (wooden, cornstarch)
• Use of compostable straws (paper or cornstarch)
• Division of waste into three streams - compostable, general and glass
• Division of recycling for cardboard and cooking oil used by stallholders
• Bike valet parking – this new initiative introduced in 2007-08, is now successfully used at other Tasmanian events
• Free parking on the Regatta Grounds encouraging people to walk or cycle to the festival
• The introduction of a carbon offset program for the gas and electricity used by stallholders. The initiative was voluntary for stallholders this year with the view to it being incorporated in the fee structure for 2009-2010
• Trialling this year of environmentally friendly cleaning products such as sprays for table cleaning
• The Festival Club will use a 'Wash against Waste' trailer to enable the use of conventional crockery and cutlery.

For further information on how to run a green event see Tourism Australia’s Green Events Fact Sheet

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