By Joseph Lo
Conferences and meetings can have significant carbon footprints. Power, ground transportation, air travel, paper and many aspects of an event can all contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Knowledge is the key towards sustainability and increased social responsibility. More and more meeting planners are recognizing the importance of planning a green event and want to do their part in helping the environment.
Whether your goal is to decrease CO2 emissions, travel-related fuel consumption or paper usage, the following smart phone apps will assist meeting planners in operating a green meeting:
Seafood Watch recommendations help you select ocean-friendly seafood at restaurants and for catered functions. The app contains current recommendations for seafood and sushi along with complete detailed information to help planners make the right choices.
Green Travel Choice allow you with just two clicks on a GPS-based map to get your CO2 emissions for bus, train, motorcycle, various car types and plane trips. Now it’s up to you to make a green travel choice for your next meeting!
The GoodGuide app instantly reveals whether products are safe, healthy, green and socially responsible. The app’s barcode scanning feature lets you quickly access GoodGuide’s science-based health, environment and social ratings for over 170,000 products. Allow this app to help guide your meeting purchasing decisions.
Green Tips! is an app that shares a new green tip each time you open it. Once you’ve seen a new tip, it will be placed in a list for you to easily reference at any time in the future.
Route4Me’s navigation app makes multi-destination trips quick and easy. Unlike most navigation systems, Route4Me provides the optimal route especially when visiting multiple destinations (i.e. during site inspection visits or when on tours). Save time, money, and energy by optimizing all tour routes.
SoundNote provides a green method of note-taking during meetings. It tracks what you type while recording audio, so you’ll never have to worry about missing anything. While playing back your recording, just tap a word. SoundNote will jump that specific point in the audio recording.
Bamboo Paper provides the ability to create virtual notebooks for your iPad. Paired with the Bamboo Stylus, it turns an iPad into the ultimate paperless communications tool for use at work and meetings.
Bump shares contact information and photos by simply bumping two phones together. This eliminates the need for printed business cards. It creates an efficient way for tradeshow attendees or meeting delegates to exchange information.
The Conference CO2 Calculator assists in identifying locations for a potential event. The app helps select locales less harmful to the environment, depending on where your delegates are travelling from.
The Green Globe app delivers a wide selection of sustainable resorts, hotels, conference centres, attractions and tour experiences. Green Globe is a recognized leader in certification of sustainable travel and tourism businesses, making it easy for you to make the right selection decisions.
About the author
Joseph Lo is a “Meeting Appspert” and the founder of Encore Web Studios, a company specializing in websites and custom online registration systems for the meeting planning, travel and hospitality industries. Encore Web Studios has partnered with Invenia Inc to develop MeetingApps.com, the first directory for apps specific to the meetings industry. MeetingApps.com has thousand of apps categorized by useful headers such as: Air Travel, Conferences, CVBs, Hotel Search, Meeting Management and much more.
