🔑 Key Takeaways
- 🔑 | GreenBiz partnered with Zero Labs to power with clean energy the VERGE-23 and Bloom-23 conferences and all attendees’ hotel stays and prove it.
- 🔑 | The collaboration showcases Scope 3 decarbonization leadership by GreenBiz and Zero Labs and provides a model for other events and any company in the world to easily and automatically reduce emissions and prove it
- 🔑 | Zero Labs is delivering easy to understand Green Proofs that link the digitized Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), proving all attendees with the highest grade proofs of this climate claim that can be used for sustainability reporting
- 🔑 | The RECs where sourced thanks to the collaboration of Strive by STX who found and provided RECS from a renewable energy project with co-benefits, enhancing the ESG profile of the decarbonization project
💡| What we did — decarbonizing an event and its scope 3
The events industry has a massive carbon footprint: convention center energy use, mountains of materials used and wasted, thousands of flights, hotel stays — it all adds up. Reducing this footprint is a major challenge.
That’s why the recent partnership between Zero Labs and GreenBiz stands out.
We worked hand-in-hand to power the Verge23 conference and hotel rooms for attendees with 100% renewable energy. We’re proud to showcase the world’s first example of an event organizer decarbonizing both the event’s direct electricity use and also their scope 3 emissions from hotel stays of all of its attendees with renewables.
The project showcases GreenBiz leadership in tackling carbon emissions and walking the walk of decarbonization.
The partnership also pioneered ways to address scope 3 emissions — those produced indirectly in a company’s supply chain or downstream use of product. Scope 3 is estimated to comprise over 70% of total emissions for many firms, yet is hard to measure and reduce.
By finding innovative ways to account for and reduce hotel stay-related emissions, this collaboration provides a model for the whole events industry. With solutions like Zero Labs’ programmable decarbonization, it can scale across conferences and exhibitions worldwide.
The time is now for carbon-free events.
🔬| What Are Scope 3 Emissions and Why Do They Matter
“Scope 3 emissions” is sustainability lingo defined in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol that groups together and refers to the emissions generated indirectly by a company’s supply chain and the downstream use of their products. If you create a product or service, and your clients use energy or produce emissions in order to use it, your product or service is contributing to the climate crisis.
For example, an event’s scope 3 would include, among other, emissions from their suppliers, material procurement, waste disposal, or emission from attendees’ business travels and hotel stays.
While companies often focus on their scope 1 and 2 emissions from owned operations, scope 3 frequently accounts for more than 70% of total emissions. Addressing it is key for firms serious about reducing their carbon footprint, and this is why the topic was central to Verge23 conversations and agenda.
Yet tackling scope 3 poses challenges. Emissions are produced by diverse third parties like vendors and customers and they often come from small sources that are difficult and costly to gather, measure, and mitigate.
That’s why innovations like Zero Labs’ programmable decarbonization are so valuable: a computational solution allows companies to automate and streamline the management of any small consumptions and emissions across their supply chain and use of their product.
Climate action must be automated to reach and decarbonize the hundreds of millions of small businesses making up the global supply chain, and the billions of products that consume electricity around the world.
📊 scope 3 accounts for more than 70% of total emissions
⚡ | How we did it — Digital Renewable Energy
The Verge23 decarbonization was achieved by digitizing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), the only standardized instrument that can be used to make environmental claims on the use of clean energy.
Zero Labs technology digitizes RECs on a blockchain, that enables transparency and traceability, but above all, allows for highly granular management of clean energy procurement through fractionalization: a normal REC represents minimum 1 MWh of electricity — like the average monthly consumption of a US household — which is a very large amount, while Zero Lab’s fractional RECs can go down to 1/1000th of that, being able to decarbonize a single Watt-Hour.
While fractionalization is more relevant for other industries such as e-mobility and fintech, In the context of the events industry, the power of fractionalization means, among other things, that each attendee could receive a proof for a precise portion of the electricity consumption due to their participation in the event, even charging it and showing it just in time directly on their ticket or badge.
🤖 | How Programmable Decarbonization Streamlines Sustainability
Renewable energy, made digital, enables programmability and automation.
Companies can integrate our Programmable Decarbonization API into their apps and workflows to seamlessly purchase fractional RECs. These can be allocated across scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions sources to significantly reduce the carbon footprint.
Programmable decarbonization also eliminates the challenges of procuring from a gated, complex market, reserved only for the large buyers, enabling anyone, anywhere in the world to easily buy renewable energy as simply as signing up for a SaaS subscription.
For the events industry, this means seamlessly buying RECs, or allocating from the venue’s own renewable energy sources (e.g. PPAs, on-site solar etc), to account for the electricity portion of emissions of event organizers and attendees. No more scrambling to source offsets after the fact or having to do complex carbon math to determine the right number of offsets. No more spending weeks or months to reconcile consumption within a sustainability department who is now free to direct their attention to the many other places they can decarbonize. Everything is automated — and your REC procurement helps accelerate investments in decarbonizing the power sector for all.
✅ | How we prove it — The Green Proofs
Because climate action must be both real and provable, we’re providing GreenBiz and every Verge23 attendee an easy to understand proof of the renewable energy certificates purchased.
These Green Proofs are automatically generated by Zero Labs solutions and allow to communicate, verify, and report the environmental claim:
- 1️⃣ [ Communicate ]
allows buyers and beneficiaries of the RECs to better communicate their climate action through the impact view of the Green Proofs; - 2️⃣ [ Verify ]
enables anyone to verify the environmental claim because the Green Proof includes the original Renewable Energy Certificate, - 3️⃣ [ Report ]
companies can easily download all proofs and RECs formatted to automatically comply with voluntary or regulated sustainability reporting obligations around the world
In the specific case of Verge23, the RECs were sourced thanks to the collaboration of Strive by STX.
Zero Labs Green Proofs enable the transparency that sustainability claims must have, demonstrating to all stakeholders that the climate action is both real and provable.
🚀 ✅ Explore the Proof
🔭 | Why It Matters: Setting an Example for Sustainable Events
The pioneering partnership between GreenBiz and Zero Labs sets an example for other event organizers and any company in the world to leverage Programmable Decarbonization solutions to accelerate their net zero goals
Zero Labs technologies can help companies to automate all the lifecycle of renewable energy management, from procurement, digitization, allocation to different scopes, proving it and communicating it to clients or stakeholders, and reporting.
Above all, automating and tracking sustainability initiatives makes it easy for organizations to engage their value chain and make progress on net zero commitments, faster.
Moreover all industry players — venue managers, event organizers and attendees — have advantages to using Zero Labs solutions:
- ✅ | Anyone can easily show their clients a proof of that energy consumption without having to write manual and unsubstantiated certifications: everyone automatically gets the top quality proof (the original REC) in an easy and compelling communication format (the Green Proof)
- ⚖️ | Everyone can easily get all the data to automatically report on sustainability reporting obligations, whether within a company’s scope 2 or scope 3
- 💰 | Besides being a cost, both venue managers and event organizers can have their clients contribute to their sustainability efforts by charging them just in time for their appropriate portion
- 💡 | Programmable Decarbonization can allow creative uses such as embedding clean energy procurement automatically in ticketing platforms, showing attendees the proofs, and also promoting new behaviors like incentivizing electric mobility or provably clean value chain partners with in event discounts or perks.
Being sustainable is the right thing to do for every organization, but it obviously strengthens their brand reputation and addresses the needs of consumers who are becoming more and more conscious about the problem, and weary of traveling to in-person events because of their potential impact.
🫵 | You — Take Action!
📌 Whether you are the venue manager or an event organizer, there are no more excuses to easily make your events powered by 100% renewable energy and prove it.
Zero Labs solutions make it super simple to take climate action.
The Green Proofs also automatically enable transparency and accounting, important for all stakeholder trust, promoting sustainability communication among venues, events and attendees, allowing all to publicly and confidently showcase commitment to climate action.
📆 Book a Demo or ✉️ ask us more information
to learn how this programmable decarbonization approach can work for your organization. We’d be glad to explore custom solutions to meet your sustainability goals.
