Zero Waste

Walking the Talk: Progress toward Zero Waste in 2006

At EGA we believe in walking our talk. Each year we work with the retreat site to encourage the best environmental practices, during our retreat and beyond. For the past three years, we worked with a team of consultants to successfully reduce waste and environmental impact during the EGA retreat, while also leaving behind practices and infrastructure to support the host venue to keep working toward Zero Waste long afterward.

“Zero Waste” refers to a set of principles and systems to reduce both the volume and toxicity of waste. This means making less waste to begin with, and maximizing the reuse, recycling, or composting of any discards generated. Within the setting of our retreats, EGA has adopted a Zero Waste target of reducing waste going to landfill by at least 80% and ensuring no waste is incinerated from our meetings.

Beginning in the early stages of retreat planning, we strive to design waste out of the system, greatly reducing the amount of paper, toxics, and other materials used, and to reuse and recycle as much as possible. Through avoided materials use and intensive recycling, we succeeded in reducing waste at previous retreats by as much as 83%! In 2004 EGA also began offering a carbon-offset program through which retreat participants could invest in renewable energies to offset the environmental impact of their flights to the conference. For 2006 we are making this carbon offset a standard part of registration for the retreat.

This year we are fortunate to have a host facility that fully shares our environmental values and has already implemented extensive recycling and other environmental practices on-site.

Asilomar adheres to the GreenPath program to reduce its environmental impact. Through this program, in the last few years Asilomar has reduced water consumption by seven million gallons, saved 174 million watts of electric energy, saved 50,000 therms of natural gas energy, reduced trash disposal by 67 tons, and recycled 79 tons of cardboard. EGA’s Zero Waste Team is working with Asilomar to expand upon this already successful program. EGA’s involvement will include the following priorities:

Prevention: We strive to reduce the amount of paper and materials used for the retreat, producing fewer, shorter printed materials and relying as much as possible on web-based and electronic information. We also ask participants to refrain from bringing unrecyclable materials—such as disposable batteries or PVC plastic folders—on-site. And as always, we reuse as many materials as possible, including the plastic name badges.

Recycling: As usual, we will have recycling containers throughout the retreat site for recovering materials.

Composting: Composting food waste is essential for any facility or community to get beyond about 50% waste reduction. Currently, Asilomar is not composting its food waste, although they would very much like to. We are working with Asilomar to explore on-site or off-site composting options, which we aim to have in place by the time of our retreat.

Food: We pride ourselves in working with each retreat site to achieve a menu that maximizes the use of sustainable, locally grown, organic food, with delicious results. In food preparation and serving, we avoid single-serving containers and over-packed items in order to prevent packaging waste.

Climate Neutral: This year’s registration fee will include contributions toward green energy to help offset the greenhouse gases we each generate in getting to the retreat.

And the best part is you get to participate! At the retreat site look for clearly labeled recycling bins and instructions for helping to achieve our Zero Waste goal. And please bring your laptop and flash drives or extra disks so that you can exchange information electronically at the retreat (and save the weight of carrying all that extra paper back home). At the end of the retreat, we’ll calculate how much waste we have prevented and see if we can continue our progress toward a Zero Waste Retreat.

Any other ideas or feedback? If you have feedback on the Zero Waste programs of previous years, or ideas on how to do even more, please let us know. We’re always looking for new ideas and welcome your input. Please contact our event planner Linda Smith with your suggestions at .