Sustainability is very high on the agenda for businesses given the targets and rules set by the government, as well as being important from a social consciousness perspective. While becoming more sustainable might seem a big challenge for businesses that have no expertise in this area, there are many incentives for businesses to invest more efforts into improving sustainable practices.

Some of the benefits of becoming more sustainable include reducing costs, increasing employee engagement, and reducing waste. Another huge incentive is gaining a competitive edge, for those involved in tenders or if you are seeing more tenders applicable to your sector, being able to provide evidence of sustainable practices and solutions is of great added value. Sustainable companies enhance their reputation in the market as well as remain compliant with regulations.

How SAGE inspires sustainable practices

Sustainability has come to the forefront of the processes involved in planning and delivering the SAGE event, we are committed to providing a valuable platform to lead the way in terms of sustainability in the sports and grounds maintenance industry.

We follow the “We are green” practices, set out by Eventex to raise environmental awareness and inspire a community of green-thinking organisers and businesses in our industry.

These are some of the sustainable practices we have in place for SAGE:

• We use local goods and services wherever it is feasible to reduce the carbon footprint and we also choose to work with companies who share our sustainability goals and values.
• Minimise the use of plastics by providing water refill stations around the showground and encourage visitors to bring their own bottles to refill. The bar will also be stocked with beer barrels that are reused, rather than bottled beers that require to be recycled.
• We will also hire glasses for the bar instead of using single-use plastics.
• All the packaging used by our on-site caterers is fully compostable and the cleaning products will be environmentally friendly. All waste will be removed from the site, sorted, and either recycled or incinerated and converted into refuse-derived fuel.
• We will encourage partners, exhibitors, and visitors to adopt sustainable practices through our communications and with signage around the site that promotes best sustainable practices.
• We will also provide detailed public transport directions to encourage visitors to use this greener method of transport.
• We are using sustainable lanyards with no plastic badge covers and encourage exhibitors to avoid producing non-sustainable freebies and flyers.

Our sustainability partners

SAGE is partnered with sustainability leaders GRASS and this partnership provides expertise to share sustainability best practices across the industry. GRASS advises businesses on tailored sustainability actions that can be implemented to reduce their impact on the environment.

In 2022 SAGE became the first event in the industry to host a sustainability summit with Bio-Circle. Visitors were offered free sustainability ground care audits and future SAGE events will provide further opportunities for businesses to understand more about how they can improve their sustainability.

We are looking forward to ensuring that SAGE 2023 is bigger and better than previous years, we have exciting news coming soon, watch this space. Learn more on our website.