Rethinking Events: What We Learned Sharing Our Sustainability Story on Earth Your While Podcast
Are you an event planner or event agency that turns sustainability policy into sustainable practices?
Our experience as a venue shows us (too often than not) that, if we are asked about our sustainability practices, e.g. energy and waste, during initial conversations with planners, that this sustainable intention doesn’t follow through into the planning and delivery stages.
Our Director of Impact, Holly Arnold, was invited to share insights on planning and delivering sustainable events on the Earth your While podcast, by B Corp Reusabox. She spoke about what it actually takes to run events without costing the earth, and why she believes businesses need to act now rather than wait for the industry to catch up.
What we actually realised about focusing on measuring emissions
Back when the podcast was recorded in 2025, the intention was to measure and report on the carbon footprint of every event using Trace by Isla. This would show insight into the most impactful areas of weddings and corporate events and therefore allow us to improve.
However, after creating reports for the first couple of events we hosted in 2025 we realised something. 1. It was extremely time consuming to collect data with suppliers which changed week by week and that we had no relationship with. 2. Couples didn’t respond to the footprint reports.
It dawned on us that…
We could spend hours and hours gathering drinks, catering, waste, travel and material data for the reports and not have any feedback or even any acknowledgement from couples and clients.
We needed to have suppliers we used consistently and trusted to share information for each event.
That if we spent so much time on data collection that we would have little time to actually analyse data and make impactful changes to our sustainability policies and practices.
So, 2026 came around and we made some changes to give event carbon footprint reporting with Trace by Isla one last go. We created a suggested catering list and signed an exclusive bar partnership and these suppliers agreed to share food and drink data for each event. We also made the decision to leave out guest travel as this relied on info from couples and clients and tweaked our report we shared to simpler and shorter.
However, in 2026 Trace by Isla event fee rose and after delivering carbon footprint reports for our first four events, and only receiving one client thank you, it became apparent that this approach probably wasn’t the most impactful way to engage our clients in sustainability. Or, to help them make more sustainable choices when planning their next event.
» Listen to the full podcast here on Spotify
Hear from Holly about what sustainable events could really look like.
So what’s next?
To engage couples, clients and event planners we have:
Created a series of helpful portals which contain sustainability tips, rules and guidelines to help with event planning.
Curated list of suggested local suppliers who share our values and adhere to our sustainability policies.
Continued to fine tune our own Supplier Policies and Client Agreements to build on our sustainability terms and include mandatory requirements.
But maybe most importantly, as a certified B Corp, we continue to shout about our sustainability practices in everything we do so that every client, supplier and partner understands our values and joins us on this crucial journey.
