ICON is reducing its climate change impact

Icon Event Solutions is taking action against climate change!

We have engaged the Carbon Reduction Institute to calculate our carbon footprint.
Through the assessment process, we intend to reduce our controllable carbon
emissions and become LowCO2 certified, while offering our clients the option to
make any event managed by Icon Event Solutions carbon neutral.

Visit www.NoCO2.com.au for more information!

USB sticks, CD ROM or Paper. Which has the greatest impact?

USB sticks are a great method to store data and if reused at every conference would result in a climate change benefit. Unfortunately the practice of handing out USB sticks rather than reusing them, as a way of avoiding paper results in far greater climate change impacts than that of paper or CD Rom’s.

If you consider that a 1g electrical circuit produces .85Kg’s CO2e, and the approximate the weight of the electrical circuits in the memory stick are 2g then the memory stick will produce over 1.7kgs of CO2e in production, this is without additional impacts caused by the manufacture of the casing and transportation. These memory sticks are not easily recycled; as such they usually end up in land fill.

From a published life cycle study undertaken by the Green initiative (www.thegreeninitiative.com ) we discovered that the emissions from production and transportation produced 1.04 Kg’s of CO2e.

Emissions from 100 pages of paper produce a little less than 1Kg of CO2e.

From our quick examination we would suggest that a CDROM is always better than a memory stick, and one should use a CD ROM when the number of pages well exceeds 100 pages. Remembering that paper is much simpler to recycle than a CD ROM.